And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.
Wasn't there something about an amendment to their constitution? I believe it might've even been the first? Something about freedom of speech?
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I could've sworn conservatives kept harping on about it.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
It only restricts the Federal government (later extended to state governments IIRC?)
This is one of many reasons Federal government is now partnered with private business.
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
Because if it were actual fascism, like the Hitler/Mussolini kind, you'd be arrest/dead the moment you spoke anything against it.
If you can freely call your leaders fascists for years, then it's not actual fascism.
You have something that looks worryingly like the Ceaușescu's Securitate "disappearing" citizens - including a little 5-year-old boy - off the streets.
Justify that.
Justify kidnapping a terrified little boy who should be at school with his friends, and locking him up in prison.
Go on, justify those actions. Let's see if you can.
YOu're a victim of fake news propaganda if you actually believe that BS. That 5 year old boy was not "disappeared", but taken by ICE to child protection services facility.
What were they supposed to do? Abandon him in the middle of the street after his dipshit dad ran away from him leaving him behind?
Damned if you do, damned if you don;t.
Right now, ICE goes out of their way to beat and arrest protestors and steal their cameras. They're not yet mowing them down but by that time it would be a little late to do something about their conduct. Remember that the current US president admires how the CCP crushed the student protestors in Tiananmen square with tanks and guns.
Sure, but if you use fascist tactics to fight fascism, are you not a fascist yourself?
And people conveniently focus only on the symptoms(rise of fascism) but not on the main cause that leads to it.
Like Hitler didn't just randomly get to power one day out of nowhere because the average German citizen was living such a good life. He was just one of the symptoms to a major problem that the Weimar republic didn't address and instead used fascist tactics to get rid of Hitler before he could gain power, and then guess what happened.
Similarly, Trump is also only but a symptom to a larger issue. Using fascist tactics to get him out of power, only makes the counter response greeter, and not make the core problem go away.
This is... a pretty confused view of history, really. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and consolidated power over the next year. At this point there was a lot of criticism of the regime, both internal and external. Things got rapidly worse after, of course, but there certainly was a period where the Nazis were in power but that there was public criticism.
Even as late as 1938, there was significant public discontent RE Kristallnacht in particular.
Every political party had public criticism before they could gain absolute power to silence that criticism.
It looks like you have paramilitaries roaming your streets - not wearing ID or proper uniforms, covering their faces to avoid identification, not answering to usual democratic controls - executing protestors.
In the latest incident, they seemed to be beating and spraying a woman with a chemical agent for filming them, and then executing a bystander who tried to help her. The regime then tried to deny reality and falsely claim that they'd attacked said paramilitary operatives.
In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation, but they seem to have been squirrelled away and the politicians who have spoken out about it have been threatened.
This all seems to be fascistic by any reasonable standard.
Really? Is that why they have vests with labels that say "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" front and back? Maybe literacy is an issue.
> covering their faces to avoid identification
Same reason SWAT and special forces covering their faces. Because just like them, ICE arrests and deports violent criminals, cartel members, human traffickers, etc. Dangerous people that could identify their faces and then track down and kill their families in retaliation, exactly what lib-dem ANTIFA & co anarchists would love to do to them if they could see their faces.
And also then, why are the "protesters" assaulting them covering their faces as well if the good guys are supposed to show their faces and only bad guys cover their faces according to your logic?
Covering their faces to avoid doxing and being attacked at their homes.
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
That’s a contradiction.
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.
All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.
Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?
For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.
The Gestapo, too, was federal agents enforcing federal law.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53939-more-americ...
Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.
Social media that actually have a large audience and that cannot be easily pressured by the US government?
No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.
They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.
deanc•1h ago
saubeidl•59m ago
MrGilbert•59m ago
BoredPositron•55m ago
libertine•54m ago
This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.
Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.
So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.
This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.
sorbusherra•29m ago