Congress has literally said it’s about foreign influence

Which is also a lie. The likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google are just as beholden to foreign governments such as the fascist regimes of India, Israel, Myanmar and others. They pay the people in Congress a lot more in legal bribes, though, so they can basically get away with anything.

It’s not a ban, if China gives up control of the app to a United States entity then there’s no problem.

Imagine the uproar if China demanded that Google stopped being a US military contractor..

What the whole thing is about is empty symbolic rhetoric and xenophobia in an election year and oppressive measures to go with it.

Americans are so racist that they can't accept the fact that non-American companies can be successful.

Who are they worried China is going to influence? Children, right? If it's adults, that's almost more insulting, they think we don't deserve to be able to see all sides of an argument and are too stupid to discern fact from fiction. We may as well dispense with free expression entirely at that point because the government can just say "you're too stupid to read this and we're worried you'll be influenced, so you can only read the books we've pre-approved for you"

It is every American's right to think freely, to speak those thoughts to others, and to have others have the opportunity to hear those thoughts whether or not they are "good influences" according to govt. It is wild how easily people are willing to throw that right away for fears of "foreign influence". What's next, banning TV shows from foreign countries because they might "corrupt our culture"? Banning books with subversive topics because they will "give people bad ideas"?. This is how the road to fascism begins.

Cna you believe that they haven't arrested every single person who ever made social contact with epstein and arrested them for rape, despite a lack of any supporting evidence that they committed a crime?

Holy shit America is crazy. How do you get to the point where more kids are dying of guns than cars in a country with too many cars. And why has poisoning gone up so much?

And giant cats it seems.

Also wtf is going on with drugs since 2019. Is this all fentanyl?

They aren't wrong though. Every time they want to screw with us they trot out the children. From gun control to banning transgender care.

Lemmy being lemmy.

Agreed. Its a list. Anyone can make a list of people. They can even put people they've never met on the list.

I can make a list, put your name on it, label "bad people" and leave it for the FBI to find. Does that prove you're bad?

For those who have truley committed the crimes suggested by the "list", I vote for a beheading (not the one attached to the neck).

it's not that tiktok is good, it's that banning it sets a bad precedent and will be used to justify further control and censorship of the internet

Whataboutism is a form of informal fallacy.

Since when is reading newspapers your government doesn't agree with a right? Since when is communicating with people your government doesn't like a right? Since when is publishing whatever you want a right? Since approximately 1776. It's such an important right that it's literally the first one in the constitution. Because our ability to speak freely and criticize the government is one of the rights that underpins all others. The medium shouldn't matter, speech is speech whether it's an app, website, chat server, newspaper, bulletin board, code, painting, drawing, whatever. If the government can just shut down any medium or venue they don't like because "it's propaganda", that basically closes the door to any open criticism of the government.

We've tried not having those rights for the sake of convenience, expediency, or social pleasantness. Tends to not end well. Ask people in Russia or Iran how that "government gets to dictate where and how you speak" thing is going for them. Insane bootlicking going on in this thread.