TikTok allowed the algorithm to amplify what people wanted to see while palestine content was suppressed on other platforms. What they said was true and they also allowed this content to be amplified, which was a good thing.

having it made the overall landscape more politically neutral.

with it changed to peddle the american propaganda line, the overall media is more biased than it was

Is there any evidence it's not?

All the worries are about what TikTok could do. Not about anything they've done so far. If you like progressive stuff, you get progressive stuff. If you like right-wing stuff, you get right-wing stuff.

Is Facebook's, or Twitter's? This is about the US federal government wanting to exert control over a popular information portal, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't think the CCP should be in control of it either. Of course, I don't think the UK should be able to backdoor services and devices, and I don't think the EU has any business hurling Chat Control around year after year. I also know that age verification is a similar tactic being employed globally to ensure the same degradation of rights.

That doesn't mean that amplification can't sometimes be a good thing, or that it wasn't a good thing that TikTok allowed so much anti-Israel content even though Instagram and other platforms routinely manipulated discoverability of anti-Israel content. Even if it was part of a plan by China to destabilize the US-Israeli imperial regime; If the US wasn't busy funding and encouraging genocide, we wouldn't have all this rope laying around with which to hang ourselves.

The truth is, the current state of international foreign affairs is so complicated, so messy, that we are not going to be able to have a nuanced yet condensed discussion which fully accounts for everything currently in motion.

So it can be true that TikTok is a tool of China meant to best America in a culture war and destabilize it from within, and that the US Corpgov is still totally in the wrong here and leveraging the usual excuses in a bid to continue the mass consolidation of media distribution under oligarchical control. Everyone is in the wrong here, and you and I are paying for it.

Whether the US government is in the wrong in this issue is immaterial, the issue is there is a system for the US people to exert control over the issue democratically, as opposed to that control being exerted by a geopolitical adversary!

TikTok is used globally. Right now, the app being under US control is arguably worse for the rest of the world than it even being under control of the CCP, which is saying a lot. Especially once you look into the media consolidation happening under the Ellisons.

The democracy issue really does matter more than that.

Sitting congresspeople said that this was one of the motivations.

Maybe "brainrot conspiracy garbage" isn't the way to describe it, then?

It is at least brainrot garbage to think that this mostly imaginary Gaza drama is worth allowing the PRC to operate an uncontrolled propaganda tool directly influencing millions of Americans! The millions of Americans in a position to be influenced by it should have clear assurances that it is being operated in accordance with the laws and systems that they control via democratic methods, not a geopolitical adversary working in opposition to them!

Why should it matter to the average citizen if the algorithmic control is coming from Ellison, Zuckerberg, or Shou Zi Chew?

Because Shou Zi Chew answers to the PRC which is a geopolitical adversary of the country the average citizen is able to democratically determine the direction of.

Do you think EU should ban facebook?

Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Shou Zi Chew (who to be clear is only the CEO of TikTok, not ByteDance) may be willing to brainrot Americans, but it's for the sake of profit, so they can be pressured to change. Facebook and Twitter cooperated with American intelligence to uncover to Russia's disinformation campaign and they have no incentivize to fake compliance.

From those investigations, it was revealed that Russia and likely other foreign adversaries do simply want to brainrot Americans for the sake of destabilizing the country. If TikTok gets investigated for Chinese intererfence, China can pressure Bytedance into sabotaging these investigations.

Ellison, Zuckerberg, and moreover Elon Musk have all contributed to Trump's rise, which has seemed fairly destabilizing for the United States. Their profit motive comes at our expense as well.

in short: freedom of speech, unless you say something I don't like?

> This is brainrot conspiracy garbage.

Here's Mitt Romney explaining that "the number of mentions of Palestinians" was the reason why "there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok": https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587

> Additionally, if you're defending TikTok because it allowed them to amplify support for the Palestinian cause, it's interesting that TikTok themselves claim that you are wrong, as they said to the US Supreme court that "allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unfounded". Are they lying here? If so, why should we trust them with control over mass social media? If they're not lying, you are wrong.

The sentence that you quoted from that Wikipedia page came at the end of this paragraph:

  Several officials subsequently cited alleged pro-Palestinian bias on the app. While advocating for a ban, Representative Mike Gallagher alleged "rampant pro-Hamas propaganda on the app". Senators Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, Representative Mike Lawler, and other Republicans have also alleged that TikTok had a pro-Palestine bias, with Lawler even alleging that TikTok was being manipulated during pro-Palestinian protests at colleges. In a filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok's attorneys said, "Allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict are unfounded."

There's no contradiction if TikTok was telling the truth about its neutrality: not amplifying support for Israel was reason enough to get banned by the United States government, and immediately after Trump's first reprieve a year ago TikTok began flagging and removing "Free Palestine" posts as hate speech (https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/tiktok-labels-free-pal...).

The conspiracy here is the idea that the only reason someone might want TikTok in the US to be under US control is to suppress information about Gaza. The best reason is to have the media that people in the US consume not be controlled by geopolitical rivals through opaque algorithms!