I mean that's all fair but the title says that it's a matter of national security because it's a Chinese owned company. Facebook is absolutely aggregious and could possibly also be considered a matter a national security (probably should be imo), but because it's an American company it's not immediately seen as a threat.

Facebook has been actually selling data to the Chinese government for a decade. Congress just keeps politely asking them to stop. But nobody wants to report on that.

Not to mention the data mining being done is an issue with Google and Meta too. And this isn't to excuse tiktok. It's to say that Google and Meta have to start being put in check too, since it's all getting so out of hand that isn't no longer just concerns of specific nations. It's an international concern that we are all in together regardless of where we are from and what international or domestic company we are dealing with.

You can't even pay for YouTube premium to stop treating you like the product for example, since your viewing and browsing habits will be data mined anyways. The phrase if you don't pay you are the product has ceased to be relevant. We are the product no matter how much we pay and no true opt out. Even just the contact lists people keep and use with messenger apps are uploaded exposing our personal numbers and names to services of companies we don't even use.

Which is why I find the whole banning TikTok concept absurd.

It’s picking one easy scapegoat company to rally around, completely ignores the thousands upon thousands of other applications that collect data on us.

It’s not security, it’s security theater. It’s lazy and designed to distract us. It’s to keep us from not asking questions about any company’s practices that might hurt someone politically or financially.

We don’t need to ban TikTok. We need to ban Tik Tok and thousands of others like it. We need to have real conversations and put forth real solutions with regards to privacy, globally. It won’t happen though. Because it’s going to cost somebody money.

This is why I can't wrap my head around any of the tiktok hate. I don't trust tiktok with my data so guess what? I don't use it. I don't see how my coworker using it is going to be the downfall of America. We've already banned it from government networks, that's plenty.

If someone else wants to censor America social media it is extremely wrong, bad and against freedom of speech.

If America wants to censor someone else's social media it is the correct and good thing to do, because it protects people.

Had tiktok been American it would have been wrong to try to censor it, but no it is not so then it is good to censor it.

I think 81% agree to say they aren't non believers because many don't want the questions of saying they might be an atheist/agnostic. ~30k different Christian sects in the U.S. and none of them can tell me why they are in their own group, so if you just say oh yeah I believe everyone shuts up. Being raised a catholic, I like to remind my mother that all 30k of them are anti catholic and they believe catholics are going to hell. They don't know what for, but they damn sure know they aren't catholic.

In truth I think ~30% of Americans are religious. The rest just keep covering for themselves. If we really wanted the truth we could instate taxes like they have in some EU countries. Pay an extra 5% taxes to your church. *poof, 50% gone in a year and claiming they paid it, while the others wondering why they didn't think to check a mon religious box.

I think there are both real and performative concerns being raised about Tik Tok as a platform.

Ideally the federal government shouldn't be deciding this sort of thing on a per-case basis at all. Pass actual data privacy legislation and force data collection to be transparent and potentially housed in US datacenters that are subject to US regulation. Then if Tik Tok can prove it's behaving responsibly it can continue to compete on an even playing field with other platforms.