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Are people naive enough to believe that the TikTok ban is going to fix data privacy concerns?
Posted by on September 22, 2025 at 4:23 pmThe Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban but it doesn't seem like it actually solves the data privacy concerns. Chinese companies can still buy Americans' personal data from legal data brokers anyway, so banning one app doesn't really protect anyone's information.
What it does do is wipe out income for millions of small creators who built audiences on TikTok. The platform was genuinely better at helping new creators get discovered compared to other social media. Most don't have comparable followings elsewhere and there's no clear migration path.
The precedent feels concerning too. Once government can ban platforms based on foreign ownership, what stops them from targeting other apps down the line? Reddit has foreign investors, so does Discord and plenty of other platforms Americans use daily.
We could have addressed the underlying issue with comprehensive data privacy laws that apply to all social media companies. But instead we get a targeted ban that doesn't actually protect user data while creating more problems.
Public support for the ban has dropped significantly over the past few years, but that didn't seem to influence the decision. Hard to tell if this was really about national security or just eliminating a competitor to American tech companies.
The whole approach seems backwards. We're treating symptoms while the actual disease of poor data privacy protection remains completely unaddressed. TikTok's competitors get to absorb all those users while the fundamental problems persist across every other platform. -
1 Reply
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>Chinese companies can still buy Americans’ personal data from legal data brokers anyway
Yeah exactly. Always comes back to money. In theory, China can get the data indirectly without paying right now, and the US hates that.
And hey, the US government is cool when Meta and Twitter mess with your data and sell it on.
Data privacy isn’t perfect in Europe either, but at least GDPR and other laws mean there’s something of a legal framework for protecting people.
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the group of people who pretend to care about tik tok does not really overlap with the group of politicians who pretend to care about tick tok. The people who understand how it works, why it matters, how it’s a threat, and how to address that threat are NOT the people who pretended to be upset NOR the politicians who are pretending to ‘solve the problem’
light anti-asian racism mixed with technological illiteracy and extreme age fuels most of the opposition to tik tok. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a genuine reason to care, but the people who ‘care’ don’t know what problem they are trying to solve or how.
people who want to see tik tok reigned in realize that they are already at the mercy of some white americans and their algorithms, already at the mercy of the china controlled tik tok algorithm, and likely are unclear how shifting ownership of tik tok could solve either the spying or the control problem.
The US supreme court is a shadow of what it was. It doesn’t supply reasoning for decisions and doesn’t follow precedent. this isn’t just my opinion, it’s the opinion of the expert judges on the lower courts – the people who would really know. The Supreme court has been captured by political interest and grift.
The US Supreme court is actually so depressing that if you learn too much about it you might lose faith in the entire concept of rule of law. Ten dollars if you can explain what ‘rule of law’ means to ten random americans. Spoiler alert: you cannot.
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I’m expecting non-stop AI ads of Donald Trump riding the American eagle, wielding a trident.
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