Grumpy David wrote:Alvin Flummux wrote:Grumpy David wrote:Alvin Flummux wrote:
79 US senators voted to ban it. They can't get 60 votes for a minimum wage hike, they can't address climate change or Christian nationalism or corruption or kids being shot in school, but they can recruit a ton of Democrats to destroy their own best messaging system.
So my original point isn't actually disputed then? Strong bipartisan support seems to only exist when it comes to tackling the Chinese Communist Party & winning Cold War II.
But it's not really about tackling China, or the new Cold War, at all - that's just how they sell it in the press, how the Democrats are able to justify betraying their voters - many of whom are avid TikTok users. It's all about money and power, and about controlling the ability of the American people (and whoever the lobbyists also hate) to communicate.
I know the "both parties equally bad" rhetoric is nonsense, and they really aren't the same, but in some respects, at some times, like this, they're only slightly different shades of the same foul and fetid color.
It doesn't need to be really tackling the CCP (although I think it is since it has got cross party support), if you can spin legislation as being tough on the CCP, you can get strong bipartisan support for legislation.
I've assumed most Tik Tokkers are too young to vote so there isn't a betrayal of voters? And it's not really a ban either, Tik Tok can just be legally separated from Bytedance so long as the new owners are not beholden to the CCP, problem solved. How does the end user get impacted by this change in ownership?
There's a lot of demographic breakdowns online, I'm learning, but everything I've seen indicates that over half of US adults between 18 and 34 use it, making them by far the largest group of users overall.
So, you've got a very significant proportion of all of the young voting generations the Democrats
have to win over, if they really want to win the upcoming election, using TikTok now. A minority of them rely on it for their income, or use it to boost their external businesses - at least a couple hundred thousand users, I believe.
Considering how narrow the election results have been in recent years, pissing off even the relative handful of people relying on TikTok for income could have a big impact on the results, let alone alienating swaths of whole generational cohorts.