Tag: tik tok nurses

The U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media Company

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives will likely vote to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok, which sets the stage for a possible full ban of the platform in the United States (Update: it did). The move will come after a slow but steady drumbeat from politicians on both sides of the aisle to ban the platform for some combination of potential and real societal harms algorithmically inflicted upon American teens by a Chinese-owned company. 

The situation is an untenable mess. A TikTok ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic, monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does. A ban would highlight, again, that people who use mainstream social media platforms run by corporations do not actually own their followers or their audiences, and that any businesses/jobs/livelihoods created on these platforms can be stripped away at any moment by the platforms or, in this case, by the United States government. 

Bytedance and TikTok itself have been put into an essentially impossible situation that is perhaps most exemplified in a 60 Minutes clip from 2022 that went viral this weekend, in which Tristan Harris, a big tech whistleblower who has turned the attention he got from the documentary The Social Dilemma into a self-serving career as a guy who talks about how social media is bad, explains that China is exporting the “opium” version of TikTok to American children. 

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The Truth About Biden’s Dancing Nurses Is the Darkest Story You’ll Hear This Christmas

In October, Northwell Health, which is New York State’s largest health care provider, fired 1,400 employees over their refusal to comply with the state’s strict vaccine mandate for employees of health care facilities, as The New York Times reported at the time.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed Governor Kathy Hochul’s mandate, which does not include religious exemptions or regular COVID-19 testing as an alternative, to stay in place, so thousands of workers across the state are likely facing unemployment or have already been fired.

This is in spite of staffing shortages in hospitals so pronounced that Hochul declared a state of emergency in September which would allow her to bring in National Guard assistance to hospitals still grappling with the pandemic.

Other states are facing health care staffing shortages as well, as omicron spreads and public health officials issue dire warnings, so others on Twitter also took a cynical view of the singing nurses in light of the Biden administration’s heavy-handed approach to pandemic vaccine mandates and public health advisories.

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