Summary
TikTok’s request to pause a pending ban and January 19th sale deadline was denied by a federal appeals court.
The court upheld the constitutionality of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, citing national security concerns.
TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has until January 19th to sell or face a ban.
This all seems so pointless while sites like X thrive.
And now I’m realizing Musk will ensure it does get banned so he can slurp everyone up into his own foreign interference cesspool.
Hopefully they all go to BlueSky instead.
Wdym pointless? That is the point. The other big social media companies and their leaders can be easily influenced by US politicians while TikTok so far couldnt. Thats why it is being banned.
TikTok users aren’t going to Bluesky, they’ll go to IG. Perhaps Reels, but I doubt it
X is loosing users to Bluesky, but much more slowly than right after the election. Engagement is much higher per follower there and everyone I’ve seen has been happy to move but I also think it’s about a critical mass of big accounts moving over and bringing their followers. A lot of left wing journalists are there. A lot of news has broken there before X, but I actually learned about Mangione’s arrest here on Lemmy first.
I think Bluesky has potential, I joined after the election when it was gaining attention (deleted my Twitter account long ago) and it was around 18M users. It gained another 3 million rapid fire, but now I think it just hit 24 or 25M. So the X-odus could use another kick in the pants.
I don’t necessarily like huge social networks, but I’m voting for it to kill X.
TikTok users are not going to use those platforms unless they have endless scroll videos. On top of that the rest of the world is not going to stop using TikTok unless it gets banned in their country. On top of that people with TikTok on their phone already are not going to stop using it unless there’s some forced removal process.
Inability to reinstall when a phone is broken or replaced will send it on a slow death spiral if all they do is remove it from the stores. Or in Android’s case I guess this could drive users into adopting other app stores.
I think they will literally delete the app from our phones if they have that capability.
Arent they going to be blocked by ISPs?
My understanding from following the issue is they are just going to be removed from app stores. Desktop use isn’t much and an ISP block would be thwarted by a VPN which are cheap and ubiquitous.
That said, take my words with a grain of salt. I’m not a primary source.
Even if they get removed from app stores unless IOS is restricting installation or android is disabling APKs you can just install it from a third party.
You have to disable Play Protect it now blocks unknown apks on android 15 and higher most users will give up only tech inclined users will most likely pursue that cource.
What about developer mode? Sideload the apps?
Iirc you don’t even need developer options enabled to side load, just allow it under settings
I’d like all of these data harvesting scumbags to get a kick where the sun don’t shine.
I’m not gonna boo one getting it because another hasn’t yet. I’m gonna cheer and hope for another.
Granted that’s not likely under the guy who wants to separate families and give billionaires tax cuts.