> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.

The US gov will do nothing to regulate US owned social networks because they're doing for free the work that the government wants to do itself: collect as much data as possible from each individual. The separation between Meta's collected data and government is just one judicial request away. That's why the US gov hates other countries having this power.

The Tik Tok divestment law was passed by overwhelmingly by both houses of the duly elected Congress. At the time, a majority of Americans polled supported the law, while a minority opposed it: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/more-support-than-oppose-tik....

In a democracy, this is how "society decides" what's in the "public good." This is not a case where legislators are going behind the public's back, hiding something they know they public would oppose. Proponents of the law have been clear in public about what the law would do and what the motivations for the law are. There is nothing closer to "society decides" than Congress overwhelmingly passing a law after making a public case for what the law would do.

Yes, they're doing it for "ideological and geopolitical reasons"--but those things are important to society! Americans are perfectly within their rights to enact legislation, through their duly elected representatives, simply on the basis of "fuck China."

It can still be both- in the sense that once a precedent is set using the these additional ideological and geopolitical motivations as momentum, maybe there will be an appetite for further algorithm regulations.

As a tech person who already understood the system, it's refreshing that I now often see the comment "I need to change my algorithm"- meaning, I can shape the parameters of what X/Twitter / Instagram/ YouTube / TikTok shows me in my feed.

I think there's growing meta-awareness (that I see as comments within these platforms) that there is "healthy" content and that the apps themselves manipulate their user's behavior patterns.

Hopefully there's momentum building that people perceive this as a public health issue.

Yeah, the ban is interesting because it’s happened before (company being forced to sell or leave), but never to a product used at this scale. There are allegedly 120M daily active users in the US alone. That’s more than a third of Americans using it every day.

While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).

But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.

That's because "being hooked" is not why it is being banned. It's banned because people are hooked on it and an adversarial foreign power has the ability to use it for their own gain.

Which is why a viable solution for TikTok was selling it to a US company. If it was just about the population "being hooked", a sale would not be an acceptable outcome.

> They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want

To sell you shoes. Not for whatever nightmarish future application of this technology and relationship between private sector and the state represents: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents...

More specifically the ban is because of the platform being used to support Palestine. There are public recordings of congressmen openly and plainly saying so.

By “this” I think they meant this moment in time rather than the ban being a result of societal scrutiny.

agree, it was just a shakedown and money grab.

some US oligarchs wanted to buy tiktok at deep discount while it was private, and make money off of making it public company