Josh Hawley Wants In On The TikTok Moral Panic Attention, Proposes Nationwide Ban
from the moral-panic-party dept
Insurrectionist sprinter Josh Hawley has joined the growing chorus of GOP politicians who’ve spent years doing jack shit about U.S. consumer privacy abuses, and now want to pretend that banning a single app — TikTok — will protect American consumers from a problem they themselves created.
Hawley, who also enjoys pretending that he cares about stuff like antitrust reform and monopoly power, insists that a TikTok ban is necessary because he just cares so much about kids’ privacy and mental health:
“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,” he said on Twitter. “Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”
The problem, as we note every time GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr puts on a similar performance, is that these guys have spent their entire careers fighting against meaningful privacy and security standards, creating the very problem they’re now pretending to address.
They oppose privacy legislation of any kind. They oppose holding companies and executives accountable for privacy abuses. They oppose fighting corruption. They oppose expanding mental health care. And they fight tooth and nail to ensure that privacy regulators at the FTC routinely lack the staff, resources, or authority to police bad actors in adtech/telecom/apps consistently at any scale.
That has resulted in a parade of companies over-collecting consumer data and then selling access to it to any imbecile with a nickel. As such, banning TikTok does nothing. You’ve singled out one company in an ocean of international companies and services all doing effectively the same thing. And the Chinese government can buy all of this data from a rotating crop of dodgy data brokers.
The motivation here isn’t consumer privacy or national security. The Trumpist GOP hasn’t shown itself to be consistent enough politically, ethically, or intellectually to deserve having any of their comments or proposals taken at face value.
I still think the GOP hyperventilation over TikTok is, as most things the modern GOP does, a dumb performance. It agitates a xenophobic base and creates the flimsy impression the GOP is “doing something about China.” And, I’d all but guarantee the GOP-coddling execs at Facebook are working overtime behind the scenes to spread moral panic about a competitor.
But, more realistically I think, this hyperventilation over TikTok nudges the ball toward the GOP’s ultimate goal: forcing the sale of the most popular video app in America to one of their cronyistic BFFs. At which point, said BFFs will engage in all the same (or worse) behavior TikTok’s now engaged in.
Trump clumsily gave this game away a while back when he tried to offload the company to his Republican-allied buddies at Walmart and Oracle. I still think that’s the ultimate goal here. And not because the GOP cares about national security and privacy, but because some rich folks are in their ear drooling over the possibility of owning TikTok’s growing ad revenue.
Filed Under: bans, china, gop, josh hawley, mental health, privacy, republican, security, social media, surveillance
Companies: tiktok
Comments on “Josh Hawley Wants In On The TikTok Moral Panic Attention, Proposes Nationwide Ban”
it’s funny that they seem to believe that we won’t just leave TikTok and go somewhere else once it gets enshittified.
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As long as they migrate to an American company, that can be held accountable if it sells data to the ChiComs, it sounds fine to me.
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No company is really being held accountable, so you are still full of shit.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44379593
Facebook sure is being held accountable for sharing user data with Chinese state controlled companies including those flagged as a threat to national security.
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Don’t make me make up another song about you little man.
Maybe its time to stop blaming the elected idiots and we should blame those who keep electing them.
There is not a SINGLE actual bad thing they can point to, but people just keep believing them.
Stupid voters are our biggest problem.
They believe schools are providing litterboxes, all drag shows are live sex acts, that a book can make kids gay.
We need to stop the stupidity and stop rewarding people who champion stupid things, but instead memaw and papaw are gonna keep voting for him to save the children that they don’t want their taxes to feed, house, or provide medical treatment to.
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Its is not just a voter problem, but also a political party problems, as many voters are disengaged from politics, and either do not vote, or always vote for the same party, because the feel like they do not have any control over who the parties put up as candidates.
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And how does one engage the already closed-off 73 million who keep voting these treasonous filth in?
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Douglas Adams missed a trick here – these people could have formed another Golgafricham ark (“Z”). On the other hand, perhaps he thought that suggesting a class of people who accepted the littertray hoax as truth was too unbelievable for even his readers/listeners.
I want a nation-wide ban of Josh Hawley...
One really needs to figure out what kind of education level is necessary to not succumb to the charms of such pied pipers, and make that the required minimum level of public education required.
Of course, that is the exact reason why Republican state legislators try to prohibit any amount of critical thinking about political matters to be tought in schools.
It’s sobering how much Hawley and his ilk resemble the damning character portrait of Diederich Heßling in Heinrich Mann’s pre-WWI novel Der Untertan. The protagonist, a sniveling hurrah-shouting authoritarian opportunist who bends his underling morals and nationalist views as needed to serve his personal advantage, is eeringly cut from the same cloth as Hawley and company, making one wonder just what makes people want to repeat historical mistakes that were clearly recognized as such even the first few times round.
Re: It's Not About Education
My former boss is well educated (B.S. from a top 25 university and MBA from a top 10 business school.) He’s genuinely very intelligent – the business is a tutoring firm prioritizing standardized testing up through the LSAT. He’s also the person in my personal life who got most sucked in to the grievance politics anger funnel that swarmed hard with Trump’s rise. If he was still in my life, he’d be the person I first hear about litterboxes in schools or the need to ban TikTok from.
Framing this as an issue of education and intelligence is wrong. It’s an issue of emotional maturity, openness to critique, and most heavily network effects of influence and trust. He had a pipeline of pied piper calls in the form of his Fox News-watching mother, who he did not have the emotional maturity to tune out. This jostled him for a while, snowballing when the pandemic cut off a lot of his other social network effects, leaving him more isolated with the online echo chamber storm he continued to get pulled into. By the time he was on the other side of it, he had a failed school board campaign on his hands, his business was starting to fail due to to the resources spent on the campaign as well as clients leaving due to his politics, a family wondering who he had turned into, and the loss of his ace-in-the-hole tutor who went off to work in research and thieve llama identities on the side.
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Well, there is correlation between the two, and the government has little hope of directly affecting emotional maturity and openness to critique, though educational facilities can at least provide somewhat of a fertile ground there. But it’s more a set of “soft skills” set of the teachers that may rub off here or not, and those tend to be not career-relevant even if they are relevant for successfully raising mature citizens not easily bluffed by demagogery.
There are no grades for that, and if there were, they’d probably be stupidly susceptible to manipulation and abuse.
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Your single point of anecdata doesn’t begin to challenge the mountains of evidence that it is, in fact, a lack of education that leads people to vote against their interests by continuously electing those who despise democracy and value only kissing the ass of Big Business. And given that Republicans have no policy goals (literally, they haven’t released a policy document since 2018) other than tax cuts for the wealthy, that would be Republicans.
Voters without a college degree are more than 30% more likely to vote Republican. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/
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Who marked this funny? Is this revenge for me not using sarcasm tags elsewhere?
Putting on my tinfoil hat, is this an attempt to set a precedent permitting bills of attainder?
'... until it's sold to one of our buddies anway.'
GOP/Insurrectionist Supporter Hawley: Now that a company we don’t like because ooga-booga china is doing the thing we’ve had no problem supporting and defending for years and decades when it comes to US companies it’s a terrible problem and they must be stopped!
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Frankly, I am hard put calling Hawley the elephant in the room when McCarthy removes Schiff/Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee for “integrity” reasons and places “if I had been in charge of the insurrection, it would have been heavily armed and succeeded” Taylor Greene on the Homeland Security Committee.
That sort of perversion really can no longer be attributed to hypocrisy or even disingenuousness. It’s open mockery of U.S. institutions.
Hawley is just a bottle fly in comparison.
Re: Re: 'I'd love to see that destroyed' is a few steps past 'mockery'
That sort of perversion really can no longer be attributed to hypocrisy or even disingenuousness. It’s open mockery of U.S. institutions.
I wouldn’t even give them that much. If someone’s objection to a failed insurrection isn’t that it happened but that it didn’t succeed then that’s not ‘mocking’ the system that’s them making clear they want to see it burned it to the ground.
what sort of c**t is this guy? if ‘TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy’ what the fuck is the likes of him and the American government doing to the lives of everyone else in the USA and everywhere? the few people who are in control of this planet are totally fucking it up, all inj the name of greed and control. they dont care what happens to things, whether Earth lives or dies! as long as they can continue getting richer on a daily basis, controlling what we can or cannot, as the case may be, do, say, look at, read, go to, buy or get hold of, nothing else matters!!
How would such a “ban” be enforced? App stores (circumventable through sideloading, at least on Android)? Great Firewall using ISP’s?
Josh Hawley is a boil on the ass of America. Perhaps someday he’ll draft legislation that actually makes a positive difference…Nah, I just don’t see it happening. What a waste of space and energy.
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Just Another Reason For Intetnet 2.0
The search engines already indexed mental illness that serves no purpose (emotional fodder as they say).
https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-a-writer-used-ai-to-plagarize-2023-1
Domestic infrastructure is a fresh start for indexed content. The old Internet can replace “Hello World” with “Hello Swirled”.
New network protocols are a simple strategy that will work for decades and/or centuries. There is nothing unique about swirled.
problem or symptom
Someone on here set me straight on this issue recently. Basically, we can focus on one of the symptoms: TikTok
or
We can focus on the problem: our politicized Intelligence agencies: NSA, CIA, FBI, SBI’s, police state complex
I consider TikTok, Meta, etc. the little fish. We gotta actually start somewhere. I say start with TikTok, next create laws preventing other data sucking companies from selling our data abroad (even to allies). Finally, go after the big fish. Unfortunately, it will always boil down to enforcement tho.
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I consider TikTok, Meta, etc. the little fish. We gotta actually start somewhere. I say start with TikTok, next create laws preventing other data sucking companies from selling our data abroad (even to allies).
That’s the thing though, if the problem is TikTok grabbing user data then going after them does nothing because they can just get it elsewhere, to best address the problem the first step should be going after the collection in general which will also impact TikTok.
VPN anyone?
Any ban on TikTok can be circumvented using a VPN
Using a VPN to bypass filtering does break any laws in the United States
Just like when I had the VPN service associated with the online radio station I did it Bitcoin only as well as no logging so no there would be no user data that could ever be subpoenaed. I broke no laws in either the United States or Australia doing that.
People in offices and schools that used my VPN were not breaking any laws in the United States
Bypassing filters does not break the law in the United States or Australia
Could it also be that Josh “I filled my trousers as I ran away” Hawley doesn’t want the footage of his scaredy bitch running away from the mob in 2021 circulating anymore?
Why is China the problem?
The Geriatric Old People really do have a Chy-nuh thing going, but why?
Two countries on this earth have spent over a decade threatening the United States with utter destruction, and one has declared nuclear capabilities. Instead of dealing with these real threats the US occupied Iraq, then Afghanistan, and is now working hard to deal with the Chy-nuh “threat.”
It’s pretty evident that if the US government cared about the health, safety, and welfare of the US people it would work hard to eliminate those threats from Iran and North Korea. Instead it’s going after the country that produces the most imported goods to the US.
Next thing we’ll hear is that Benelux countries can’t join NATO because Turkey doesn’t want to let them. That’s the same Turkey that declined to work with the US and instead bought SAMs from Russia. Never mind that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has countries that don’t touch any part of the Atlantic Ocean (e.g. Turkey, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia, Spain, etc. etc.).
It’s high time performative murderers, rapists, and child molesters (aka Congressmen) shut their little pieholes and either resign or do something useful. “Tik Tok” is a social media site. It shouldn’t in any way be the subject of a “This is how we beat America’s Enemies” story. China is not our enemy. They have not vowed our destruction. Iran and North Korea have. Go at them.
Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz and MTG and all the rest of the magas and their home states can just secede and go off and be a new country. We won’t miss them. They won’t miss us. If you disagree with the “we” and “us” in this paragraph just substitute “they” and “their”.
E
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Other way around.
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