US Politics |OT|

[LurkerJ]

LurkerJ said:

Shtinamin_ said:

Anyone see the Tik Tok ban "bill" (idk what to call it, dismissive order?) getting passed by Congress?
Supposedly, Congress had a unusual and strange amount of people calling them saying that Tik Tok notified and gave them the number to call Congress, after it passed. There's been more told but I found that weird.
Does anyone here use Tik Tok?

The WSJ (yesterday), on the left

The Economist (today), on the right

Just read it for yourself.

The TikTok ban has been around DC for years. Why now are both parties fully behind it suddenly? Read: pic.twitter.com/9bzbHsdBGQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 14, 2024

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TikTok isn’t some revolutionary force—and NatSec hatred for it is long simmering—but the nonstop images of dead Palestinians is absolutely what sealed its fate.

The media and government moral panic over TikTok, of course, pre-dates the latest “war” in Gaza. But Gaza is what will put the ban over the top; it’s clearly the dispositive force. If one doesn’t believe this, they should ask lawmakers and pro-Israel organizations, who openly say as much. Several pro-Israel lobbying groups have called for a ban on TikTok. Senator-turned-full-time-pro-Israel-troll John Fetterman has repeatedly blamed TikTok for younger voters’ pro-Palestine preferences, and conservative Senator Josh Hawley has as well. This has been accompanied by a parallel media panic—from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal—about how TikTok is turning your teen into a Hamas sympathizer. 

The November election is fast approaching, and Biden is hurting badly with young voters and voters of color over his lockstep support of what half of Biden voters view as genocide. Now, the administration believes, is the time to change people’s information—rather than change reality. This is consistent with a Biden reelection strategy, as I detailed last week, premised on manipulating public perception rather than substantively changing policy. Conservative Democrats and Republicans, for the most part, have always been pro-banning TikTok over their lizard brain anti-China posture (though Trump has recently switched positions, either because his inner circle is being bought off, or just because he wants to do the opposite of what Biden wants to do, it’s not clear). Overall, the missing element in getting a TikTok ban through Congress has been Liberal-Left squeamishness with such an overt act of censorship. Gaza has radically changed this dynamic, and now the vast majority of congressional Democrats support the move because, clearly, the President doesn’t plan on ending his support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan any time soon. 

Ultimately, the TikTok ban should be viewed as an act of elite desperation. With an emerging bipartisan consensus of further border militarization, and climate chaos accelerating faster than even our most pessimistic predictions, the need to control and manage images of human suffering is more urgent than ever. Gaza isn’t a deliberate testing ground for this—it’s its own unique and discrete evil that stems from unique and discrete colonial conditions. But it is fast becoming one incidentally.

https://www.columnblog.com/p/the-tiktok-ban-is-an-act-of-elite