I tried to tell you guys that this is what the whole TikTok thing was really about. It has nothing to do with data safety considering half the app store is also from Chinese companies with the exact same condition, and no one in Washington wanted to address that.
The mass data leak from the US to China is like water flowing through a sive. Anyone who argues that we should plug up one hole and only one hole is either an idiot or as an alternate motive.
That alternate motive was that TikTok was allowing young people in the US to talk about Israel negatively. So congress went ahead and singled them out, and collapsed their business if they wouldn’t comply on the real issue or get bought out by Steven Mnuchin and friends who would definately implement a different content policy
Remember that the first person to be angling to buy this was a US federal employee and departmental officer and his business partners.
This is why you don’t let your government single out single business even if they are Chinese. How bad does that look to any other foreign company from any country that congress crashed a business and then tried to offer the wrecked business to a government employee on a discount sale? At least if they don’t adopt a policy of banning speech protesting a genocide committed by someone our congress chooses to like (why I don’t understand?). Like do you all understand how this is a bad pattern.
The whole idea of attacking TikTok should have been dismissed as an idea on that alone regardless of the details. This is why laws are meant to address behavior and not companies, so it applies to everyone big or small, so congress can’t single out or bully companies that differ from congress’s political tastes (in this case the political taste that genocide is good when Israel does it).
This is why the phrase “Congress is deciding if {company} will be banned” is something we should have all picked up on as being absurd and unacceptable unless we live in idiocracy. Those are words that should never exist no matter the circumstances. If any of this had been legitimate it would have been “Congress is deciding if sending American personal data to Chinese servers will be made illegal.”
But congratulations. No one argued the principle and now you can’t say Free Palestine on TikTok because it’s hate speech. Because wanting people to be free and or not be bombed is hate speech now. There is no way TikTok would have come to that content policy decision if they weren’t bullied. Now we see the point of the bullying.
I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy ever being mainstream enough to get censored.
But, yeah, they already do this to other US companies. I’m certain discussions on every mainstream platform are carefully moderated by algorithms to ensure the Zionist entity is protected.
But think about it. Even small companies will self-censor in fear that the government will act against them. Every company exists in hope of being big enough that they could have a target on their back. Yes lemmy operates at a scale that it can be considered a personal project and will likely stay at that scale. But that’s not the majority of social media. Maybe it was a bit of a joke on my part to say Lemmy would be targeted. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous that American business owners should think woah the government will intentionally wreck me and try to sell me off to their friends if there is some 100% legal and reasonable conversation on my platform they don’t like.
Either there are principles to protect you or there aren’t. The fact that we have a politician openly saying we attack companies to buy them cheap or ask for half should be pretty fucking scary to anyone who owns a business.
The Eastern European countries for a long time were said to lack economic development precisely because of corruption. This is exactly the kind of interaction with government that caused that. The idea that it doesn’t matter because they are big and I am not doesn’t work. In the long run small businesses will be more vulnerable if the principle doesn’t stand that the government can’t attack you and sell you off to their friends. If that principle is gone then it’s gone.
Yes, this is definitely happening in smaller companies too - passion projects like Lemmy are different, but anyone who wants to make money is going to do what it takes to keep the government happy.