POV: It's January 19th

[email protected]

Non sequitur muct?

Klnsfw 🏳️‍🌈

I'm pretty sure the NSA and its chinese counterpart never heard about ActivityPub.

[email protected]

Ho hum. TikTok ain’t going anywhere.

It will be banned for a short while, long enough for Trump to enforce sale to Meta in exchange for their absolute hard turn top to bottom in everything they do to help spread misinformation and keep the plebs angry.

[email protected]

::: spoiler spoiler
"Propaganda from the CCP is not a good thing"

"It's not propaganda."

"It literally is."

"It's not."

"It literally is, and here are the receipts."

"It's not."

"This is the line in the receipt where it clearly states it is."

"Well, my point is that propaganda is not necessarily evil."

"Good or evil, it's a prerequisite for anyone with pretensions to politics beyond a tribal or gut instinct to recognize that something is propaganda."

"You're missing my point."
:::

Please. Show me where this summary is wrong. Show me the point I missed.

[email protected]

In that case, "in this house" we like Tiktok?

[email protected]

This comment summarized my point.

But you don't care about that. You want a receipt for "winning the argument".

IninewCrow

Reminds of my favourite description of the US ....

"The US isn't a country, it's a corporation with a military"

[email protected]

This comment summarized my point.

The comment I quoted and responded to, yes.

Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod

Yeah, only AMIERICAN companies can spy on our citizens and flood them with propaganda!

USA! USA! USA!

[email protected]

I happen to like that tiktok spreads information about the genocide in Gaza, which is being shadowbanned on the western platforms.

Context is important. The current context of the tiktok ban is that it's hard for the US to control the political message with that big of a platform not under US control.

I happen to dislike censorship, even if it is done by the west.

[email protected]

The point where I didn't deny propaganda being pushed in that comment.

archomrade [he/him]

I wonder if op has a strong opinion about china.

[email protected]

I happen to like that tiktok spreads information about the genocide in Gaza,

So in the interest of that, you chose to deny that Tiktok is used to push CCP propaganda.

which is being shadowbanned on the western platforms.

Some of the Western platforms run by billionaires, yes, whom I explicitly compared to the CCP in the original comment.

Context is important. The current context of the tiktok ban is that it’s hard for the US to control the political message with that big of a platform not under US control.

You think it's the US government which is pushing Facebook and Twitter to censor Palestinian voices?

I happen to dislike censorship, even if it is done by the west.

But you'll tolerate it, if it pushes one view you do like? Or just if it's not done by the West?

[email protected]

But this entire conversation sprouted from you explicitly denying propaganda being pushed. Saying "My point isn't that it's not propaganda" when every previous comment was about you denying it's propaganda rings very hollow.

[email protected]

What time was that? (genuinely curious)

[email protected]

The United Nations Human Rights Council doesn't seem to think so. It put this to bed two years ago. https://www.euractiv.com/section/eu-china/news/setback-for-the-west-un-body-rejects-historic-debate-on-chinas-human-rights-record/

[email protected]

So in the interest of that, you chose to deny that Tiktok is used to push CCP propaganda.

There's a difference in not knowing and denying.

Some of the Western platforms run by billionaires, yes, whom I explicitly compared to the CCP in the original comment.

Yeah, when you ignored the context of the OP.

You think it's the US government which is pushing Facebook and Twitter to censor Palestinian voices?

Are you always this nitpicky?

But you'll tolerate it, if it pushes one view you do like? Or just if it's not done by the West?

No. I prefer a wide range of different news sources where I can judge the biases. I can still get good information from Tiktok if I know that I should be critical concerning anything about China's policy.

So you'd prefer it if Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/Amazon are the only ones in control of mass online discourse? (That's the type of strawman you're constructing of me)

[email protected]

Denying is different than not knowing.

[email protected]

Before any of us were alive. Some would say before centralized banking in the early 20th

[email protected]

Late 18th century. The chaos of the French Revolution arguably diluted its viability as an example to other countries, despite the structure of democratic government being objectively better, so you can argue that we were still on the cutting-edge through the 19th century, even, when most countries were still autocracies or constitutional monarchies with extremely questionable de jure voting systems.

I would argue as late as the 1950s, our democratic structure was closer to average than below-average, but by the 1970s, what gave the US more in-common with other developed democracies was that we had extensive practice with our democratic system; by then our structure was not just hopelessly outdated, but a structure that no one in their right mind would take seriously as a foundation for a new government. Come the fall of most of the single-party Soviet-backed regimes of the 1990s, and the only countries we actually beat out for being a 'good democracy' are ones that... well, are only questionably democracies to begin with. And even then, most of them have structures that are superior to our's; only a tradition of civic participation has led us to hobble on as long as we have without becoming an outright authoritarian state.

Though this might be the last month I can say that, which says a lot about the failures of our shitshow of an attempt at implementing democracy.