This was always about running defense for the likes of Israel and it’s ongoing televised genocide….

This isn’t about national security, if it had been this would’ve never gotten as far as it has been, the door would’ve been closed long ago.

TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms. It also just happens to be the one with the largest amount of users and engagement, compared to the others..

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous times TikTok has been on the chopping block (nearly every year it’s existed) understand what’s at play here.

Anyone who's used TikTok knows the platform is heavily moderated and not at all an "anything goes" paradise for the exchange of free ideas. So, if, as you suggested, the moderation does not favour the US government's mandate, then the obvious question one should be asking is: whose mandate does it favour?

False dichotomy. It doesn't need to favor anyone else's mandate. We are observing a lack of favor to any one mandate. The US mandate is to suppress "anti-US views" (in quotations because what the American populace thinks is anti-US/pro-US and what the American government thinks is anti-US/pro-US is oftentimes drastically different).

What people really mean (without even knowing it) when they say tiktok pushes propaganda is that it isn't suppressing the propaganda they don't like. They mean that after the "funniest Trump moments" video with 10 million views, there shouldn't be a video about the evils of Black Rock, it should instead be one of the "US military is EPIC" phonk edits.

Again, this would only be true if the platform had a laissez-faire attitude toward content, which it clearly does not. What can and can not be shown on the platform is heavily moderated, therefore there is _some_ mandate being fulfilled.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

This has nothing to do with Israel. It's economic protectionism and refusing to allow a totalitarian government to have a platform they can use to run unfetterd influence campaigns on our citizens.

> TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms

Oh please, possible government censorship/influence over US-run social media has been investigated to death over the past several years. There's no there there.

> There's no there there.

You mean, like the DoD antivax campaign [1], which Meta explicitly allowed to continue after warning DoD their campaign was obvious to them? The same Meta that constantly publishes blog posts about them taking down foreign influence campaigns? DoD already admitted, but I guess I should probably take your word that these things don’t exist? (To be fair, these things usually don’t exist (tm) until declassified decades later. I always wondered why this one was exposed and even acknowledged so soon.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

Basically, whatever the liability insurance wants for you to be in compliance, than that’s the standard.

Gotta love neocons and liberals voting this down as if you’re making up facts…when it’s objectively the truth

What difference does its government make when you purposely employ collective punishment via embargo?

For a country that prides itself as “democracy driven and human rights protector” it sure seems just as hostile as the supposed acting government.

The US embargo includes NATO members. I don’t have the source handy at the moment but it’s clear that any current trade partners with the US would be violating the embargo if they attempt read with Cuba.

That is not true. Canada trades with Cuba and has done so for decades.

and agent orange, and destroy literally everything before we tail it back to our own country, not before we tell our vets to “suck it up” and bootstrap their PTSD due to exposure of aforementioned war crimes.

HN is fast becoming reddit with comments like these, sadly.

"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

bottom of the hn guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just to be clear, are you insinuating that my comment is somehow misleading or untrue?

Not strictly untrue, but it's a trite dismissal of US foreign policy in general.

>The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else.

The USSR and it's space program would argue differently.

How so? NASA wasn't motivated by the profit motive in the 1960s, either. And SpaceX has completely trounced NASA and the Russians in rocket technology.

The disease of Enshittification ?

Whatever you call it, when you're beholden to the shareholders rather than your customers.

Friedman's Malady

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

If companies that lower profits to benefit society as a whole are infringing on the freedom of their shareholders then any company that breaks the law to raise profits is basically just a criminal for hire. Ignorance is just irresponsible at that point.

And why should we let something that harms society remain legal? At the very least society ought to collect on the damages, and a company that's pushed all responsibility for deciding what is and isn't right to do onto the rest of society has no right to complain when society decides it ought to stop.

Of course there are people who want to abolish law in favour of bartering as well, but I think they think you're allowed to hit them in the face for thinking that.

Of course, perfect economics would assume maximizing long term shareholder value, which means not exploiting your customers. But "Shareholder Value" these days invariably means "short term share price" i.e. burn goodwill to make the shares spike in the next 5 years so they can be dumped profitably, and never mind what comes after.

I mean it's par for the course. What better business model exists than the turning a want into a need. Caffeine comes to mind

>Society can't be built with the idea that everything has to work for the most troubled and challenging individuals.

But it is, nearly every product, procedure, process is aimed at the lowest common denominator, it's the entire reasoning warning labels exist, or fail safe systems (like airbags) exist.

If every product or process was truly aimed at the lowest common denominator, then we wouldn't have warning labels on hot coffee, we would instead have medium-heated coffee.

The label doesn't confirm if the coffee is hot, it warns that it might be.

My point is that hot coffee is still being sold everywhere, even though we know for a fact that it's dangerous for our most vulnerable individuals. Mentally unstable people will sometimes spill coffee and when the coffee is hot it causes burns. If we really wanted to make coffee safe for our most vulnerable individuals, we would outlaw hot coffee, and just have medium-heated coffee instead. So the existence of "warning labels on hot coffee" is really evidence for my point, not evidence for your point.

then you would agree that warning labels are the lowest common denominator solution to a well known fact, vis-a-vis all processes, products, & procedures are aimed at the lowest factor.

I don't know what that sentence means. But I know it doesn't mean "warning labels solve the problem that everything has to work for the most troubled and challenging individuals", which is what this discussion was about at least a few messages ago.