To address some specific points:

What I would like to see personally is these users, and internet users in general, take their personal internet data privacy and security seriously (regardless of whether it’s against apps like tik tok that are foreign, or meta/Google etc all which are domestic).

Absolutely agreed. But as you also discuss, there’s only so much individuals can do so long as the US lacks real privacy laws. Even those of us who do our best to de-google and make our online lives as private as possible can not truly avoid the surveilance state- just make it less easy for the surviellance state to gather info about us.

Leveraging this ban against the federal government to sue for the right to data privacy would be a good idea as well. The argument probably should be that this bill foments the idea that this scale of internet/app data collection is harmful, and if it’s harmful in the hands of a foreign adversary it’s just as harmful in the hands of the federal government who have countless times leaked the sensitive information of citizens.

Good news! This is the core of TikTok’s legal argument in front of the supreme court right now. And I’m sure that people with the funds and connections are planning on pursuing this strategy in the future, too, but these kinds of legal solutions take time.

Leaving Tik Tok hurts Tik Tok more than it helps them, yes, even as a form of protest.

They aren’t leaving tiktok. They’re in both places.

Some Tik Tok users have already been banned from rednote for the content they post and comments they make.

That’s fine, people aren’t jumping to rednote to actually move their content there for the long haul. No one is legitimately thinking this is where everyone will move and they’ll pick back up as if nothing had happened. It’s simply a method of civil disobedience that has an added benefit of cultural exchange.

I’m not downplaying the users, their number, or that they are trying to protest by taking these steps. I’m pointing out that the apparatus to thwart what they’re doing is basically already in place

Everyone jumping into Rednote is aware of this.

Hell, if creators got together and put in a bid to buy Tik Tok, that would be a better protest because at least then they’d be collectively attempting to save it.

It would certinally be neat, but there’s no way the userbase could do this. Even if enough people got together to put up the capital, there’s a whole suite of regulations and funding nonsense that would get in the way. The law text gives the president a lot of leeway in how the sale is handled, so even if the people put up the money the president could just say “nah” and ban it anyway. This also requires ByteDance to even agree to the sale, too. So far, all indications are that ByteDance is planning on just letting things shut down according to the law (which also bans any US companies from hosting or providing services to a company that has been banned) It’s clear that the ideal resolution that congress wanted was for tiktok to either go away (as it is now) or be purchased by someone who could add it to the toolbelt of corporate america and bring it under the thumb of the surviellance state. A group of citizens purchasing the app to preserve it is not one of these outcomes that congress is expecting nor would tolerate long-run.

I think you are fixating on Rednote here rather than seeing Rednote as a component of the efforts at hand. It’s a minor item, it may be short lived, and it’s absolutely not the thing anyone is viewing as the stone that will break the back of the ban law. It’s not easy to know for sure how many are making accounts, but it’s most likely less than 1 million so far, which is obviously a drop in the bucket of the tiktok user base. MOST of the organizing on TikTok is not focused on Rednote, and instead of trying to ensure there are lines of communication for people to find each other elsewhere once the ban hits, because nothing else could be done in such a short span of time once it became clear the ban was actually going to happen.

For now, the secondary goals are focused on trying to ensure Meta doesn’t gain as a result of this, especially since it bankrolled the lobbying efforts for this ban, congress members have invested in Meta in anticipation of the ban, and because Meta is worse with data collection (and sells the data to china anyway). We’ll see if that happens, but between Bluesky, the account closures as a result of Meta’s awful moderation rollbacks, and the long-held distaste for Meta by TikTok users, it’s certinally possible.

I know you’ve drawn some comparisons to reddit, but it’s really not the same. Reddit didn’t go away by government action, and it acted on it’s own to disgruntle it’s user base, and even then, it wasn’t the entire user base. It is absolutely not the same. I know we all love to view the lemmy migration as a big deal here, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t change anything for reddit as a corporate entity and there was little fuel for continuing the conversation. We moved. We set up something that works for some, doesn’t for others. The same is true of the multiple Twitter -> Mastodon+ migrations. Enough people moved over to the fediverse to establish a much more sustainable userbase and allow for more innovation, but no one in social media is looking at the ~11 million Mastodon users and thinking “wow, we gotta win them back”. The fediverse is a long-term game when it comes to the future of social media and in it’s present state, it may not even be that future. But it might (along with BlueSky, assuming it doesn’t enshittify too) inspire the next-gen solution that does pull people off of centralized social media.

Successful acts of protest and change require a multi-pronged effort. Some efforts fail. Others are successful. Many efforts seem like failures until the downstream effects become more apparent years later. Some of the most successful acts of protest during the civil rights era were viewed at the time as silly and counter-productive, but now we view many of those things as instrumental in bringing about change.

I think a lot of people in the TikTok world who are organizing around this situation would agree with your broader points. Tiktok, after all, was a haven for organizing on behalf of progressive efforts in human rights, privacy, and other areas. I certinally agree with your sentiment and concerns as well.