Americans are baffled to discover TikTok is more censored under US ownership than it ever was under China.

The new Terms of Service landed, buried in the usual miles of impenetrable lawyer-speak, but their intent was clear. The app now explicitly reserves the right to collect a dystopian catalogue of your most sensitive data: ‘racial or ethnic origin’, ‘sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status’. The irony is, from my perspective, quite simply delicious: the platform was wrested from China over fears of data harvesting, only for its American stewards to formalise the practice in writing. Then, the censorship began. Not the covert, hypothetical manipulation Washington feared from Beijing, but overt, clumsy suppression.

Crosspost: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10514104