Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.

Details:

* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...

a non-zero amount of censorship is unavoidable in a social media platform. when nation state A is in control of the censorship of social media platform Z, and designs the censorship of that platform to intentionally hurt nation state B by causing division amongst the citizens of nation state B, then nation state B has every right to ban social media platform Z.

>designs the censorship of that platform to intentionally hurt nation state B by causing division amongst the citizens of nation state B

If the division is a result of the platform exposing people in that nation to information that they previously didn't have access to, due to the government censoring it, then it's absolutely a good thing for the people of the nation. The government of the nation state can get fucked when its interests go against the interests of its people. A divided people is a much better thing than a people united by ignorance and belief in falsehood.