All previous attempts to pass laws banning the app failed.
Then, during the war in Gaza, American politicians started complaining that TikTok users were posting too much pro-Palestinian content,[0] and there was suddenly majority support in the US Congress for banning the app.
Here's what Mitt Romney said about the reason why Congress suddenly supported a ban:
> Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.
Ironically, a big reason why TikTok has more pro-Palestinian content than Facebook is because Facebook suppresses circulation of pro-Palestinian posts. TikTok, as a non-American platform, is less heavily politically censored on this topic.
Your timeline doesn't work. The timeline wasn't: Gaza war starts -> lots of TikTok posts about it -> people suddenly want to ban TikTok. The timeline was: people in the US realize it's a big problem that the country's primary geopolitical rival controls the algorithm that serves information to the majority of its young people -> policymakers in the US start working on banning TikTok or forcing divestment -> the Gaza war starts -> policymakers see it as an example of the problem (which may or may not be accurate!) -> they continue pushing to ban TikTok and eventually succeed.
It's hard to suss out cause and effect in any case, but it's pretty easy to reject a hypothesized cause when the effect predates it.
We don't need to be rivals at all. What a frustratingly shallow worldview. I don't know why people swallow that tripe. The world is big enough for multiple empires.
> policymakers in the US start working on banning TikTok or forcing divestment
"Policymakers" is a very vague term. The accurate term here is right-wing politicians. They didn't have enough support to push through their TikTok ban, and repeated efforts failed.
> It's hard to suss out cause and effect in any case
It's not difficult in this case. Many American politicians are on the record about why they voted to ban TikTok. Unlike Facebook and other platforms, TikTok did not suppress pro-Palestinian views. That's why it's banned.
Yeah "policymakers" was intentionally vague, to include people who aren't themselves politicians, but are involved in influencing policy. People like staffers and policy-focused writers and people at think tanks and government agencies.
Your impression that this is just a right-wing politician thing simply isn't accurate. I have been reading arguments - mostly from the center-left - about this problem for years, long before the war in Gaza.
Frankly, you sound like a very young person who just started paying attention to politics, and think that the one thing you've seen happen so far is the only thing that has happened.
I think your idea of what represents "center-left" is miscalibrated. The China hysteria in the US is primarily a right-wing phenomenon, encompassing both the Republicans and much of the Democratic establishment.
It's clear (both from the timeline and from numerous statements by the politicians involved) that the reason this latest attempt to ban TikTok succeeded, where previous attempts had failed, was because TikTok did not suppress anti-Israeli / pro-Palestinian views in the way that Facebook did.
There's no need to get personal about a dispute over something like this. I've been following politics for a few decades in a few different languages. I'm old enough to know that the exponential growth in American hysteria over China is a new phenomenon (though I'm not old enough to compare it to the earlier Red Scare of the 1950s). There definitely would be enough psychopathy over China in American politics to have banned TikTok earlier, were it not for the fact that it's the most popular social network in the US and politicians were afraid of backlash. Gaza - and specifically TikTok's "failure" to suppress pro-Palestinian views - is what pushed the issue over the line, and convinced Congress - which is extremely pro-Israeli, on the whole - to ban TikTok.
> It's clear (both from the timeline and from numerous statements by the politicians involved) that the reason this latest attempt to ban TikTok succeeded, where previous attempts had failed, was because TikTok did not suppress anti-Israeli / pro-Palestinian views in the way that Facebook did.
You keep saying this, while providing zero reason to believe it is true beyond "it is the most recent thing that happened".
It's even more mystifying to me that you are apparently so susceptible to this kind of recency bias, without being young.
