@allanb Psst. It’s Zoomers and below who use TikTok mostly. We Millennials aren’t the kids who you want to get off your lawn anymore, we’re too old, the youngest of us are in our mid-30s.
@allanb Well, here’s the thing. I am one of those silly vapid Millennials but I’m also a 15-year cybersecurity professional who’s reasonably familiar with issues like tracking and surveillance in America and the threats posed by various state actors.
TikTok isn’t really a spying platform any more than any other commercial social media network, but Meta, for whom it is a serious competitor, would like the public and the government to think otherwise.
AOC may not have monetary interest in TikTok, but she has generational interest (her national constituents are largely Millennials and younger). TikTok is mostly an artifact of Millennials and younger.
The fact remains it is a spying platform, and has been used to put surveillance on journalists and others.
National security interests are being weighed against generational-centered social platforms, and one would expect her to object.
@MisuseCase The point I was making was an attempt to describe AOC's self interest in TikTok as being Millennial interest, and a conflict of interest (or representation, depending on how you want to look at it.)
@allanb That’s a pretty silly thing to say given the OP’s post about very real financial stakes in the TikTok bill, which AOC doesn’t have (unlike some other Representatives).
Also *I* don’t use TikTok contrary to your Millennial stereotype, thanks very much. I know some people who do. They use it to promote their businesses or work (fitness training, live performance, crafts, etc.).
@allanb My point is that you are using a generational term in the sense of “those damn kids who won’t get off my lawn” for a Congresswoman in her mid-30s and also incidentally for me, a woman in her middle age who is a parent with a mortgage.
@allanb And now Steve Mnuchin is trying to get investors together to buy TikTok. Peter Thiel of Palantir seems pretty interested too. They’d like to do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter, or do what they accuse the CCP of doing with it (which they are not actually doing).
And now there’s this whole thing about members of Congress having a financial interest in TikTok being sold to American owners and benefiting companies they hold a stake in.
@allanb Even our intelligence agencies, after marching along with Meta beating the Yellow Peril drum for a while, have admitted that TikTok isn’t used for spying.
It doesn’t sell data on its users to American data brokers that they can buy from, which they don’t like, which is part of why they wanted to ban it (or now, they want to get it sold to an American owner).
@allanb@MisuseCase No, you get that wrong. It's the single non-spying platform, all others are PRISM partners of the NSA.
China does spy, but mostly on their own citizens, which means Douyin users then.
Transferring ownership to an US citizen means they can send out a national security letter. The “national security issue” is that they absolutely want to spy on TikTok users, the easiest way possible.
Plus of course the surveillance capitalists want their access to the data, too.
@forthy42@allanb Well, if China wants to spy on us they can buy our data from the data brokers that all the American social media companies (and our ISPs and the credit bureaus and such) sell it to. And they do, in fact!
Or they can hack it from the credit bureaus or maybe OPM. They do that too.
The whole point of discussing this is an exercise in futility. People simply do not have enough information to judge for themselves, and there is some movement to declassify some persuasive intelligence that Congress was briefed on.
@allanb@forthy42 Except that Meta’s lobbying campaign to get TikTok banned is public, intelligence agencies’ admission that the espionage risks of TikTok are purely hypothetical is public, Mnuchin and Thiel’s interest in acquiring TikTok is public, *and* representatives’ financial stake in getting TikTok acquired by an American owner is public. They are all in this discussion/thread for you to see.