U.S. politicians’ move toward forcing Chinese owner ByteDance to divest ownership or, failing that, banning the popular TikTok video service is “hypocrisy,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says.
“Tracking you is questionable, but, my gosh, look at what we’re accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google and that’s how they make their businesses,” said Woz. “We’re saying, ‘Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese.’ Well, they learned it from us.”
“If you have a principal: a person should not be tracked without them knowing it. You apply it the same to every company or every country,” said Woz. “You don’t say here’s one case where we’re going to outlaw an app, but we’re not going to do it in these other cases… I don’t like the hypocrisy.”
MacDailyNews Take: As water is to the average human body, hypocrisy is to the average politician’s. Sans hypocrisy, most politicians would immediately go poof!
MacDailyNews Note: CNN’s Laura Coates speaks with Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, about online privacy and Congress’ pending legislation that could lead to a ban of TikTok here.
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Woz is dumb about many business/political things. In this case I fails to see chinas hypocrisy of China never letting in American companies into China. Facebook, Google, Twitter have all been banned in China. We shouldn’t ban TikTok here because of politics, but because of reciprocity. Let our stuff in China, and we’ll let your crap in here. Don’t let our stuff in, we won’t let yours in.
https://x.com/piratewires/status/1723763485069521065?s=57
Unfortunately our idiot politicians want to pass this ban with “think of the children” bs around it so they can use this law to later ban your American speech here at home on Twitter. It’s another back door to control American speech. Everyone should oppose this BS. They could ban TikTok on a trade basis but they are trying to use this issue as a backdoor to ban American speech.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/19/congress-only-wants-to-ban-tiktok-so-the-deep-state-can-use-it-to-spy-on-americans/
Take it from a Canadian…a bill criminalizing free speech is already being attempted here! You could receive fines or jail time, (even if it is truth), purely because it might be damaging or hurtful. (Bill C-63)
Unbelievable what’s happening in Canada. It’s been brewing for about a decade. Frog in the proverbial boiling pot right before your eyes.
Ireland just sidestepped bizarre control measures, but it’s not over.
Same mind that advocated for the “Mis-Info Board.” It’s the new virus.
Tech smart, common sense stupid
On the other side of “reciprocity,” from what I understand, China does not enable the a portion of “US TT content” to be presented in China. I see this as almost the bigger deal, as China knows the content is largely garbage and the garbage is culturally destructive/corrosive. Probably one of the same reasons (besides harmful CCP info), China doesn’t want their younger generation to be crippled by FB crap. Limiting/curating what’s best for a culture’s mind walks a fine line btwn smart/strategic and censorship. It’s absurd to think one that heralds free-speech while limiting what their kid’s consumes, would be categorically called; hypocritical…unless one has no moral GPS. I recall the curious memory of a certain tech CEO that enforced strict limit’s on their child’s screen time. Obviously a believer in tech and the items (they) created, but….
No need to conflate personal rearing with government action. It’s disingenuously incomparable.
China is evil, full stop. They are the epitome of hypocrites. They filter out TikTok posts to their own population that they push to the west knowing full well it’s harmful and corrosive. They know what they are doing on both ends of their propaganda pipeline.
“No need to conflate personal rearing with government action. It’s disingenuously incomparable.”
Hardly. “Personally rearing” happens to outside of the home and schools are the most significant example and inextricably linked to “govt action.”
If you don’t understand the difference is a problem for your own resolution.
This is all such a joke. TikTok isn’t doing anything that most internet/social media companies aren’t doing. Very few complain about how Google/Facebook/Microsoft hoover up their data and sell it on the open market. Proof is how widely these products are on everyone’s platforms reading this.
But you say, it’s China. Okay. But exactly what is China getting that they can’t on the open market? Why go through the effort to build an app and convince 100 million Americans to use it 90 minutes a day, when 300 million Americans give up all the same data 24/7.
If you don’t want China/Facebook/Google to know everything about you, stop using their products. Use alternative software or social media that doesn’t collect and sell you.
If China is so innocent in all this, then why doesnt China let google/facebook/twitter into it’s country, yet we should take their crap into ours?
Yea, that’s bs and giving them equal moral footing in this debate is hypocrisy itself.