The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved legislation that would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell it within 180 days… or risk having the app barred from app stores and web hosting services in the United States.
The vote was 352 in favor; 65 opposed. Pretty impressive disapproval of a social media company’s ownership model. The supporters of the bill didn’t like the fact that ByteDance might be providing user data to the Chinese government, letting the Communists know which dancing cat video is most popular among Americans.
Our economic system is threatened. And also, maybe our own home-grown social media empires.
One of the 65 Representatives opposed to the bill — Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — suggested that “the bill that’s offered here today, even though I know it’s offered genuinely, could also be named the Facebook Protection and Enhancement Act. Because, it’s not the American people who are going to benefit most from this; it’s going to be Facebook. Their stock is going to go up…
“And I know [the bill] doesn’t ban it. It forces divestiture of the company. This sounds like when American companies try to do business in Third World countries, and the dictator says, ‘Well, you can do business here; you just got to give me your company’…”
Reportedly, the bill might have trouble getting Senate approval. Are the Senators a bunch of Communist sympathizers? Or maybe they don’t own Facebook stock?
Actually, the company that runs Facebook is called ‘Meta’. The word ‘meta’ relates to the Greek word meaning ‘beyond’ or ‘after’. Or maybe, ‘at a higher level’.
Like in ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaverse’.
And ‘metaprofits’.
I found this graph on Statista.com
So, revenues last year of about $135 billion? And ‘Net Income’ (which I assume means ‘profits’) of maybe $40 billion. That’s a lot of profit, for a company that really doesn’t do anything. I mean, doesn’t do anything meaningful.
Meta doesn’t grow food, or build homes, or refine oil, or generate electricity, or manufacture anything useful to human beings. It collects information about you, and sells it.
Amazingly, Facebook has about 3 billion users, who spend endless hours doing all the work of sharing the personal details of their lives, so Facebook can sell the information. Maybe people should get paid, for doing all this work on behalf of a multi-billion-dollar company? But I’m not holding my breath.
And why would I hold my breath? I avoid Facebook like the plague. I also avoid TikTok, out of a sense of fairness. Would I willingly give Communists my personal information, when I deny it to Capitalists? No way. That’s un-American.
Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, couldn’t prevent a roomful of Congressional representatives from voting overwhelmingly to require TikTok to become Capitalist, even when he explained that all of the social media companies are doing the same thing: collecting personal info, without giving us any indication of what they are collecting and who they are selling it to. If I know anything about Capitalists, they will be just as willing as ByteDance to provide information about Americans to anyone with enough Dollars.
Or enough Yuan.
There’s no question that the current owners of TikTok are Communists. It would be silly to own a business in China and not be a Communist. Then again, TikTok itself is pretty silly, so who really knows? There’s so much about China we don’t know. Like, do they still use chopsticks? In 2019, they landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, and it sent back photos. Would a country that can land a vehicle on the moon still use chopsticks?
Incidentally, the far side of the moon looks a lot like the near side. But scientists probably expected that.
On TikTok, you can watch a black and white video of the spacecraft — affectionately named ‘Chang’e-4’ in English, and 嫦娥四号 in Chinese — as it approaches its landing spot and touches down.
That’s a video I couldn’t find on Facebook.
On Facebook, I found videos of Elon Musk’s experimental Starship exploding after takeoff.
Is there something the US Congress doesn’t want us to know about?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.