Can the US Lawmakers do anything about the US companies harvesting my data and selling it off… please?

So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?

Whatever Tiktok is doing, the correct response is to write enforcable laws to prevent ANY company from doing what Tiktok is doing.

This is bad governance.

This was a committee vote. The bill now must advance to the floor, pass a vote there, then go through the same process in the Senate.

Many bills are passed out of committee but are never given an actual vote.

Many users called lawmakers' offices to complain, congressional staffers told Politico. "It's so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They're teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can't take it away," one House GOP staffer was quoted as saying.

and they still voted 50-0. really tells you something about how much these politicians are willing to listen to their constituents.

Tik Tok pushes so much toxic content towards children and teenagers it should be shut down in my opinion.

I wonder if this could also be applied to games owned in whole or part by Tencent...

Good. Fuck them and all social media controlled by any big mega corp. But fuck the CCP especially.

My prediction is coming true: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/10ofony/anything_to_protect_the_youth/

Bold move. Who are they going to blame all the online privacy issues once they cant yell about the Chinese? Or are we going to start pretending everythings fine then?

Bytedance needs to figure out which congresspeople Meta has been bribing.

So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.

I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:

• It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren't controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can't. The bill literally defines "foreign adversary controlled application" as "TikTok, or ..." (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn't what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.

• It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is "controlled by a foreign adversary" entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn't need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.

• According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of "covered company"), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that's included.

• There is a specific exemption for any app that's for posting reviews (g.2.B). I'm guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.

So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.

The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.

High school nerds pay attention. This is how you can make some money and have an excuse to talk to the hot girls…by installing a vpn on their phones so they can still have their tik tok.

Get one popular girls phone set up and every girl in the school will be hitting you up within a week.

Sooo... How do Republican's square being the party of "Small Govt" and then interfering in a private business?

...TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

Lemmy.world has horrible takes as usual when it comes to censorship of a platform lmao

An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."

So apps can still be banned after divestiture, based on an arbitrary decision by one corrupt and potentially insane and/or senile person?

After all the talk of a "rules based order", I'm disappointed - this isn't a rule, its a leap of faith into the arms of serial liars.

I don't see why users would even have a problem with this. Same services, more competitive market, and with less ties to an evil dictatorship should be celebrated, right?

I feel there's a lot of China influence in this thread. I wonder why that is...