this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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You make a good point and then draw the wrong conclusion.
You hit the nail on the head with what they should be doing (broad industry regulations), but then you COMPLETELY missed the point you made. Congress is NOT banning TikTok because they collect too much data, they're banning it because it's TikTok and the "data" is just an excuse...otherwise they'd pass real data privacy laws.
Another platform will pop up over the next week if TikTok is banned. What they want is to sell TikTok to someone that will change the platform because it's too powerful. This isn't to push "government propaganda", but simply to change the algorithm to not be so good. They don't want you to gain class consciousness or have political discourse, they want you to be distracted with silly cat videos and memes...and maybe a side of culture war, but nothing else.
Or an existing social media will try to take its place; Meta and Google have sites which imitate TikTok's UI (at least, in part).
I don't think it's the only reason necessarily (and I'm inclined to agree your reasons are, at least, part of it) but I think the chance for U. S. companies to cannibalize TikTok's market demographics is, also, a happy little coincidence of the consequences.
The thing with TikTok is almost all americans on it have gravitated away from other platforms because it has more to offer. I don't think there's a large demographic on TikTok who don't precisely understand why they use TikTok over other platforms. (Edit: youth I suppose) I also believe this is why they want to force TikTok to sell, they want to have it exist as a platform but with new management.
If TikTok doesn't sell and it does get banned, I almost guarantee the demographic will quickly find themselves on another, likely Chinese owned, platform. This will still be a win for Congress as they'll have fractured TikTok and weakened the demographic as a whole.
Time will tell.