• Ulrich@feddit.org
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    10 days ago

    I feel like this is an incredibly obvious yes. They were down for 12 hours. They put Trump’s name as their savior in the error message… Then the CEO shows up to his inauguration. Trump freely admits that it is because he believes TikTok helped him win the election:

    “I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points,” Trump said in December. “And there are those that say TikTok had something to do with that.”

    So. Yeah. Of fucking course it was. Fuck national security and all that nonsense, ME ME ME!

  • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Can someone explain to me how they believe the Trump team convinced Biden to sign the ban?

    If you think it was a stunt for the benefit of Trump, you’re implying the Biden admin was in on it. Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems the more likely scenario is Biden just royally fucked up again to the point of somehow making Trump look good.

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 days ago

      I thought the stunt was on the part if TikTok. They shut down when they didn’t have to and then came back on all chummy with Trump when he announced the 90 day extension. The play was to kiss Trump’s ass. Biden signed it and they took advantage of the situation.

  • Freefall@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Yeah, the super obvious political stunt was a political stunt. It only fools those that don’t pay any attention or don’t know how anything works. Biden said he would not enforce the order, that trump signed during his first term, to ban tiktok. Then tiktok chose to shut itself down for a day and chose to turn itself back on with its political pandering notice. It is all to manipulate it’s users while also paying fealty to the incoming president (because China knows that is how easy he is to control).

  • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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    10 days ago

    All CEOs understood how to behave with such an arrogant person: flatter him and he will bow to your every wims.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      Bow even harder and you get pardoned for every crime you did…

      Who came up with this pardon shit anyway?!

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 days ago

    I will argue that so was the Israel cease-fire “strong-man” act. In fact my conspiracy theory is that Israel explicitly delayed the cease-fire so that Trump could look strong by finishing it, then whined a bit in the newspapers to sell it. This is not even the first time they GOP has done this, as per the Iran hostages affair.

    • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 days ago

      Headline from fox news: “Oliver North: Israel will have to put people on the ground and it will be bloody”

      Reality is truly stranger than fiction. If any writer continued to use a character like him for so long in such obvious ways without suffering any consequences, readers’ suspension of disbelief would be shattered.

      He was there for Iran-Contra. He is still here for Israel-Hamas. The exact same playbook. Place political gain over national interest. Put lives needlessly in danger and extend suffering for an easy win.

    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 days ago

      Yeah and it’s not far-fetched considering how openly Netanyahu endorsed Trump. With Trump in office Netanyahu can do whatever he wants, waging a costly in terms of PR war will be no longer necessary.

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    The whole thing? No. The 14 hour temper tantrum? Absolutely.

  • Red_October@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    No, and that’s an incredibly stupid premise. Trump wasn’t the one to push the Ban. He wasn’t the one to keep it going to completion, and he sure didn’t PLAN on not having a second consecutive term. He’s just following his most basic programming of If Biden did(Thing); Undo(Thing)

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    It likely was, hell it had me fooled. I was honestly about to say “Maybe I was wrong about him? Maybe Kamala losing won’t be so bad…”

    But then he signed the Transgender order and on the same day Musk did the Nazi salute and I’m like “And this is what I get for questioning my own world view.”

    At least I voted Harris in the election and spent literally only two or three days (17-20) being fooled, and let’s be honest, it was Copium, not truly being swayed

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      I was honestly about to say “Maybe I was wrong about him? Maybe Kamala losing won’t be so bad…”

      And this is why democracy sucks. Voters have the memory of a flea and the emotions of a toddler.

      - “Democracy is the worst form of govt except for all the other ones that have been tried”

  • Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 days ago

    Trump started the whole thing because he was unpopular on Tiktok. Republicans jumped on board because young people were politically organizing on the platform and they don’t like that.

    But up to that point, there was no really effort, even as much as they tried to claim “national security”.

    Then when the real information about Palestine was being spread there the democrats jumped on board because they are the same as republicans when if comes to foreign policy.

    That’s what started the actual push that gained momentum. They had no actual evidence about the stuff they claimed. Also, if the claim applied to Tiktok, it applies to all the other social media. But they don’t actually care about privacy. They only care about a platform that they couldn’t control and wasn’t catering to them.

    If they cared about privacy, they would have pushed general privacy legislation and/or regulation and oversight on all social media.

    The reversal was Biden realizing he does not have a good legacy and with Trump, there was a lot more content this time around that was pro-trump (and also tiktok gave him a million dollars). So now he gets to claim he “saved tiktolk” when he was the start of the whole thing.

  • kvasir476@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I don’t think there was any grand Machiavellian scheme. Trump just capitalized on historic democrat incompetence to make himself look good.

    • Guntrigger@sopuli.xyz
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      10 days ago

      Which part of Trump proposing, implementing and then yesterday delaying the ban was down to Democrat incompetence?

      • kvasir476@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Please explain how Trump managed to implement this ban with a democrat controlled senate and Joe Biden as president.

        • Guntrigger@sopuli.xyz
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          10 days ago

          Thanks, I’ll field this extremely easy question - By executive order before it was a bipartisan bill supported by every level of government:

          In 2020, President Donald Trump proposed a ban of the app as he viewed it as a national security threat. In August, he signed an executive order instructing that ByteDance divest from the app, though the order was blocked by a court injunction in September and was reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.

          To me, making sure that everyone agrees with a new policy before it becomes law, and sending it through the proper channels to be debated and then enacted, doesn’t really seem like a dumb thing.

          The dumb thing would be to propose a new law, enact it unilaterally, have it revoked because it was enacted unilaterally, then have everyone agree on it anyway when you pass it through the proper channels, then toss it in the trash yourself at literally the first opportunity.

                • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  The law stipulates that the POTUS is the person who determines that a platform or app is in violation. Once that happens, an investigation is launched through the AG’s office and applicable agencies. After that the AG’s office makes a determination about whether or not the app/platform is in violation of the law. Once that happens, the platform or app can appeal. But if they lose that appeal then they have a limited time to divest to another entity before their platform is banned and the POTUS can pause not revoke this process for a period of time (to give the app time to divest as is required). So basically Trump now has given Tik Tok a stay of execution so to speak but that doesn’t mean they won’t be forced to shut down or divest.

                  This was a direct politically planned and intended effect of this push so close to the inauguration, so far as I can tell. It’s politicians doing political stuff.

                  Right now he looks like the savior (and that’s intentional, both Tik Tok and Trump get something out of that). But in the long term I don’t know that most Tik Tok users are going to remember that Trump bought the app back and to actually remove the law requires an act of Congress. That will take more time than the limited amount that Trump can essentially delay the removal of the app from app stores and American servers.

                  I honestly think this was a fuck you to Trump from Biden because essentially Biden’s political career is over. Trump is going to do a lot of damage over the next 4 years and do as much as he can to undo any of the progress that has been made. It’s kind of a petty move on Biden’s part, but Trump started this colossal movement against Tik Tok in the first place.

        • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
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          10 days ago

          I think both of you are right: The idea of banning TikTok came during his presidency and he campaigned for it.
          However it was a policy supported by Biden and with bipartisan vote, which means Dems were playing at home, so it was on them to not look stupid.

          It is mentioned in some news that the Facebook people pushed a lot for TikTok’s ban so they could capitalize on a user exodus, though that TikTok feasts on user data and shares it back in China is also true. However you don’t solve that with a ban, you solve that with a proper privacy policy. But no US company wants that, no sir. So the Dems were played like the devil went down to Georgia and they were the proverbial fiddle.

          But… I guess saying this is preaching to the choir as most people in here are dutifully aware of privacy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 days ago

    Nobody except genocide joe thought it was a good idea to censor an extremely popular app because it revealed the truth about his genocide.