Comment by mark_l_watson

It’s January. My bad for not being as infallible as you are.

That’s not what Romney said. His - and the wider establishment’s - concern is that unsanctioned content is allowed to be treated the same as any other content.

Anyone knows that TikTok simply tailors your feed to your interests & interactions. But even this is not acceptable when it comes to topics the establishment doesn’t want disseminated.

And if they had undeniable proof that TikTok was boosting/manipulating such content, why haven’t they revealed it now that TikTok US is under US control?

But it’s okay to not be concerned. Just don’t come crying when the book burning starts.

Back in the late-90s, I was watching a panel on CNN discussing the new "information age". Everyone talked optimistically about how the internet was gonna benefit humanity because people would be better informed - only the best information would make its way to the top, all the crap would be filtered out. But there was one naysayer, and I'll never forget what he said: More information is not better information. Others on the panel couldn't believe his cynicism; said he didn't understand people. I think about that a lot these days.

Well isn't it interesting that at the same time that these social media platforms were getting off the ground, the VC class decided founder control was super important and now essentially all of the biggest companies in the world are in the sole control of men who do questionable activies on islands in the Caribbean.

Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a private showing of a PR project for the wife of the president premiering on a competing streaming network whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime has murdered.

You flooded yourselves with bullshit. The people yearn for bullshit. Always have.

A CDN, a static HTML5 player and a very good lawyer for when the DOJ comes knocking, like they did with Hannah Natanson, Jacob Frey and Tim Walz.

You'd do that I guess, right, if you saw something happening you thought was bad - you'd run straight into a legal fight that could bankrupt you? Nah, you're a tough guy on the internet! Nothing scares you!

Choose your alignment wisely! You can only serve the Good or the Evil!

Because the concept of limiting state power for when the other side takes power is not in the American political vocabulary.

If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.

But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.

For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.

In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.

So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."

Maybe. I just find most “which administration really started XYZ” discussions are a way for people to feel better about their affiliations. Because ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are continuous and not an inherent property of things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain that happens to start wherever convenient for your rhetorical purposes.

Surely you know how things work at scale.

If you introduce friction with something that millions or more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has a hell of a lot more than a million users.

I still don’t get what you’re trying to say or why you’re downplaying this.

I didn’t realize that TikTok retroactively wiped every young person’s brains of the content they watched over the past months as well!

The question isn't whether they've been successful in hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide information (or I would say, to control the narrative), which it clearly is.

This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.

If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.