Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is calling for a TikTok ban.

This is a day after another Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio, published an OpEd in Fox News also pushing for a ban.

To be sure, these Republicans care very little about TikTok's surveillance of users.

Their problem is that, unlike Meta or Twitter, TikTok is not an American company.

Nevertheless, I personally think surveillance capitalism should be banned wholesale on all social networks.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/us-business/article-us-senator-josh-hawley-wants-to-ban-tiktok-nationwide/

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley wants to ban TikTok nationwide

‘TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,’ U.S. Senator Josh Hawley said on Twitter

The Globe and Mail

I really hope that progressives turn off the lizard brain response of "TikTok is good because Republicans say it's bad."

No, TikTok is bad.

The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend.

Is their opposition based on nationalism, racism, and yellow peril? Probably.

Is TikTok still monitoring and tracking teenagers, feeding them unhealthy content based on "relevancy" algorithms, screwing with their mental health? Yes.

All surveillance capitalism should be banned.

The more thoughtful progressive response to the eventual TikTok ban is to say:

"Hey Republicans, you're right about TikTok. But let's go further than TikTok. Let's ban all surveillance, user tracking, and black box algorithms from ALL social media -- including with American-owned companies!

"And while we're at it, let's dismantle all Big Tech monopolies, especially the ones building walled gardens that lock users into their platforms!"

The cold reality is that TikTok will be banned.

I've seen this play out with other Chinese companies. Perfect example is Huawei.

First, the US intelligence community raises alarms about security.

Then branches of the US government start to ban the tech made by these Chinese companies.

Finally, there's a wholesale ban of the tech being sold to or used by consumers.

Regarding TikTok, this is yet another weakness of Big Tech. What happens should it be banned?

@atomicpoet It's occurred to me that if I was a developer who wanted to boost the fediverse and had a machiavellian bent, I'd be working on an ActivityPub Tiktok clone.
@misc Good thing lots of developers (including myself) are working on extending audio & video to the Fediverse!
@atomicpoet @misc I think a good way to popularize fediverse video sharing would be to convince a smaller, but well established streaming service (ie dropout.tv, curiosity stream/nebula, vrv etc) to become part of the fediverse. Of course they’d want to have some way to paywall content, which sucks but is necessary to make that sort of professional content. But they already have servers and platforms for streaming their content.