Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@The Smiling Pony
WHAT!?

I’m sick and tired of being punished for trying to be a decent person while evil rotten people who don’t give a flying fuck about how evil and rotten they are get into positions of power, make all the laws, own all the important land, own and control the corporations, hire complete fucking retards while truly talented people get thrown under the bus, etc.! And all of this despite all the safeguards we have tried to put into place with those fucking regulations you never seem to stop preaching the virtues of. This has gone on since the dawn of human history, and I’m just tired of it.

This whole thing needs a reset.

@The Smiling Pony
Even I have to agree with you on this.

Welp. We now have less than 24 hours until the Orange Devil takes the Oath of Office…

i don’t think it was good thing tiktok is banned. for all it’s faults it did let people make a living and find community and news it also meant youtube didn’t have a monopaly on videos on the internet.

Pornhub was banned in parts of the US and now TikTok is fully banned. It is making me a little worried this trend will continue now that US authorities got a taste for it.

@Angrybrony
Tiktoks recipe is easily replicable.

@Angrybrony
YouTube Shorts is the closest thing I’ve used to TikTok.

Trump just wrote “Save TikTok” on his social media account. Ironic since he is the one who wanted to ban it in the first place. He will probably place blame for the ban on Biden somehow.

More likely.

@The Smiling Pony
Me three.

For those needing a source, here is Donald’s original Executive Order attempting to ban TikTok.

He first became interested in doing so after K-Pop fans and Tiktok influencers pranked him by pretending to sign up to attend his Tulsa rally (the same one Herman Cain got COVID at and died). This resulted in Trump drastically and publicly overestimating how many people were in attendance, embarrassing him.

Congressional Republicans drafted a bill to enforce Trump’s ban, but it sat in limbo after the election. Then, Democrats all jumped on board in 2023 after they realized that Americans were being exposed to pro-Palestine content and getting to see what Israel was doing in Gaza. Biden happily signed it, and now only in the weekend before leaving office does he regret it.

Dems pissed away yet another constituency. Trump is now working to “save Tiktok,” and the platform itself has pivoted since their CEO’s visit to become explicitly pro-Trump.

Lemon8 is also down for the moment, but its phone notification saying the site is blocked adds that (paraphrasing here) “Fortunately, President Trump is working hard to restore your access.”

EDIT: Found another screen, and Tiktok is praising Trump on their page too.

@BlitztheDragon
Didn’t Dems want to ban TikTok before the whole Gaza conflict? Becuase I’m sure I remember them agreeing to banning it back when the government thought it was Chinese spyware.

Also you can still easily look up all the horrible things happening in Palestine on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/YouTube ect. I don’t think “Dems banned it becusse they didn’t want the population to see how bad the situation in Palestine is” holds much weight considering all you have to do is type “Palestine” into a search bar for a site and you get plenty if results showing hiw badly they are being treated.

Hmm, fair. I just remember it gaining traction among enough Dems in 2023 to get the ban signed in 2024, and often heard it was because of the pro-Palestine content. But it’s also true that the older Dems are badly Cold War-brained and operate off “China = bad” with little thought or nuance.

Regardless, according to Alejandra Caraballo over on Bsky, after doing some testing on accessibility, she determined Tiktok isn’t just doing a simple IP ban, but they’ve gone the extra mile in compliance by suspending all accounts with US-based phone numbers and serving them the message I showed above praising Trump.

If the ban does get lifted during Trump’s term, I expect its algorithms to get tweaked to become as much of a rabbithole for far-right propaganda as Meta platforms, YouTube, and Twitter, if not moreso. Like when Musk bought Twitter, only to a much larger and more influential site.

@BlitztheDragon
What if Trump’s idea of saving TikTok is to be the one to buy it?

That’s one possibility yes. There’s rumors (that I haven’t substantiated, so grain of salt) that Meta might buy it. Don’t think Elon has said anything yet, but I make a point not to check in on what garbage is falling out of his mouth at a given time.

@BlitztheDragon
I’m just thinking of the salt that will come if that happens.

Also, I remember hearing that TikTok has been ban in China for awhile. Funny how things work if true.

@BlitztheDragon
Elon buys Tik Tok and makes it worse.

@igotnopicks
“I loved buying social media platforms and ruining them so much I want to do it a second time!”

Another day, another GenAI startup causing a scandal.

A Utah-based startup called SchoolAI has rolled out a chatbot of Anne Frank that is a grotesque caricature of the young woman. “While there’s a veneer of the historical character, it also shows all the flaws of OpenAI-style chatbots: overly courteous, unhelpfully vague, and so uplifting that it borders on wax museum-creepy.” Among other things, it is really eager to tell users to forgive and forget regarding Ms. Frank’s death, and urges them not to blame anyone for the Holocaust.

I feel I must remind folks that the Generative AI craze is part of a fascist project to destroy critical thinking and education. One teacher tweeted (and then deleted due to harassment) a thread about how her students were using GPT as a search engine, then being locked into the belief that whatever misinfo the bot spat out is fact and getting really belligerent toward those who try to correct them.

@BlitztheDragon
This shit is why regulations are needed. No company can be trusted to self-regulate.

@BlitztheDragon
I know Palestine has been a serious subject, but trying to say that the Government banned TikTok “becuase of Palestine” is REALLY grasping at straws considering there had been concerns about the app long before the conflict has taken place. (IIRC people had done multiple investigations into it and found out that the app is genuinely close to being spyware, hence the concerns about banning it)

@Meanlucario
According to the article I linked that got deleted, Trump isn’t going to be buying TikTok.

Trump will extended the ban deadline by 90 days once he takes office. If the company that owns TikTok is able to find a buyer for the US version with that time period then TikTok goes back to normal. If they can’t, then the ban takes effect.

@Background Pony #1F81
The reason your post was deleted was because it was a link and nothing else. A mod made a post on top of the same page clarifying the rules on that.