I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes. Our Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead". The First Amendment makes no attempt to moderate content; you can say pretty much whatever you want. If China's use of TikTok for propaganda upsets you, then it's on you to make a compelling argument that is better than theirs. (I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue. People are just mad that it's telling kids to eat tide pods and then they get sick. Who knew that underfunding public education for years would have consequences.)
At the end of the day, what this law is asking for is a Great Firewall around the US, that prohibits which websites its citizens can visit. I do not want that, even if China's market practices are unfair. The cure is worse than the disease.
Tiktok isn't "some website", it is partially owned and controlled by the CCP, which influences what content gets shown to Americans. A majority of zoomers get most of their news and information primarily from this platform, which again is under the influence of a hostile foreign government. (TikTok also spies on US citizens for the CCP, but let's keep this restricted to the free speech argument about the ban).
We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.
What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3]
People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there.
Please don’t act like people who are against top down banning of apps in the usa are aligned with autocracy. That’s precisely the opposite of accurate.
This would be like if someone were against the government suppressing leftist groups and barring radicals from hollywood and such during the red scare because of the violation of civil liberties, then you walked up and said they were pro russia. Completely reductive.
Current trading activities doesn't mean much by themselves. Europe also still trades with Russia. This is sort of missing the forest for the trees. You have to look at whether there are concerted efforts from Europe/US to REDUCE trade with Russia/China, which is yes. And whether US/Europe is restricting China's military capability, which is yes.
We might not be in a direct, conventional, people-shooting-each-other war, but the trade war with them is absolutely raging and we are pretty evenly matched. It's a nightmare. One of the CCP's greatest strengths is to exploit/play our economics game better than ourselves, with all the advantages that brings.
Doesn’t matter as far as the Constitution is concerned. It says “Congress shall make no law …”. Doesn’t add anything about “except in time of war” or “when it’s really inconvenient” or “when parents fail to monitor their child”.
US is not at war with China. We are in a period of escalating tension, but have broad and far reaching economic, political, and social ties. Despite our disagreements, we have in the past and continue to cooperate on mutually beneficial terms.
That said, the CCP is not hoping for the United States to suddenly become politically stabilized. They are not hoping for the US populace to embrace the current social and economic order which stands at odds to Chinese goals. The CCP is an extremely disciplined predator organization with a long-term outlook, and should be dealt with appropriately.
1. China was originally a significant importer of goods from Russia. Over the past two years, due to the lower oil prices from Russia, the import volume has increased by 30%.
2. The total purchasing amount from the European Union and India surpasses that of China, with no single entity making significant purchases of Russian energy.
3. Perhaps you should look into the historical records of energy procurement by India. In 2021, trade with Russia was essentially negligible, but it now constitutes 36%. The main financier behind the scenes should be clearer now.
> Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings.
2A is for well regulated militias, from an era when the government struggled to raise and maintain a standing army, and wasn't sure an army could even be trusted. 2A was antiquated long before schools started having to teach toddlers survival tactics.
Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does.
You are absolutely right. Turning the other cheek when facing an opponent which is pointing at you as an source of ultimate evil and acting like it is plainly stupid.
Just curious why the marketplace of ideas won't solve this? If people don't want to be influenced or want to avoid it, won't they? Or if a competitor wants to deliver a more engaging product, shouldn't consumer choice result in the best possible outcome?
This has a feeling of paternalism that rubs me the wrong way. I'd be happy to hear of a case where large scale paternalism worked out, but so far it seems like paternalism is a failed ideology whose proponents continue to not realize that, "just one more try; it will work."
What I'm hearing is an argument for cultural-Sakokuism and I have to remind the reader that it never works.
Sorry, but this just has an air of "My concerns are the only valid ones," that makes it hard to take seriously. I don't want to live in a world where my kids can get shot at school. I guess we just have different priorities, but I think it goes too far when we start saying, "Mine are right."
That's quite alright, I didn't expect to convince someone who believes that in a war for survival, an opposing dictatorship can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy. Just because you know, it's idealistic.
Can you walk me through the scenario you're envisioning? I'm having a hard time following the series of events that starts with the status quo of TikTok ownership and results in the Chinese state being able to harvest your organs. Can you paint me a picture of a timeline or a series of key turns that would lead to that outcome?
Anything's possible I guess, I mean, did anyone expect that China would allow the release of the man made covid virus from its Wuhan biolab (intentionally, or unintentionally) out to the world, killing millions in the process and giving long covid to millions more? And US and UK would be the ones that developed the vaccine successfully, and allowed the rest of the world to fully function after 2 years? And China would be the one that couldn't come up with its own vaccine, and just decided to release it into the wild in 2022 and bury any sort of mention of mass covid deaths [1]? I mean, if it were the other way around, and US and the rest of world was still shut down after 2 years while China was fully functional, TikTok could have been used by China to incite civil unrest in democratic countries, leading some to its downfall.
I mean, there's no way China would release a covid 2, right?
Ok, but can you be specific about the scenario you're envisioning that begins with China's current ownership of TikTok and ends with organ harvesting? It sounds like a specific concern you have and you've given it careful consideration.
> can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy.
if we think is a true, accurate and non-hyperbolic description of tik-tok (and by extension social media) i don’t want anyone with power to operate them. whether it’s a billionaire from any country or any government.
it isn’t clear to me why we would treat a billionaire, a mega corporation, or a government any different with anything this powerful. again, if we were to agree this description is accurate no organization or person should have this kind of influence.
i agree, we have to start somewhere. and if we think it’s the most powerful propaganda weapon ever developed, the place to start is by regulating _all_ social media.
A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.
It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that.
The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right.
Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended.
We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.
The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.
So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.
That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.
Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch.
When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them.
Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests.
It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence.
The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.
Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.
Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US.
I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.
The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go.
Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious.
No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever.
There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US.
There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.
If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down.
On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade.
It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.
Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights.
This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment.
First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).
If someone wants to subject themselves to CCP propaganda, why stop them? If they’re that lacking in critical thinking, then maybe they’re getting what they deserve. It’s not like anyone is forcing people to use TikTok.
The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok, much less pro-CCP. Sure there's the potential, but it's really not even much of a thing IRL.
It doesnt have to be pro CCP. All they have to do is slightly boost anti US or anti Israel or anti Ukraine and it is the same thing. Slowly boiling the frog by boosting fringe voices and promoting them as common views.
It doesn't even have to be anti-US, all it needs to do is make the factions inside the US fight each other even more. Push two sides that are both "pro-US". That is, after all, also how CIA overthrows governments...
Yes and for this reason I support a similar ban in my country of large scale American owned social media. Given they are all guilty of the above claims.
What the American owned social networks have done to my countries populace, including its youth, is nothing short of a disaster. It’s induced complete brain rot.
Promoting fringe voices is perfectly legitimate, both in terms of politics and free speech. That is literally how all social progress comes about. It's also how we elected our previous President. Like it or not, those are the rules of the game.
> The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok
I recommend that you sit down in front of your computer with your beverage of choice and do a deep dive into psyops.
To address your comment, there are psyops actors in every significant (and some less significant) social media platform, even our own Hacker News. Whether you want to call their work “propaganda” or something else is mostly semantics — they are operating with an agenda, sometimes/often one that conflicts with the will and/or best interest of our nation (in my case, the US).
Fair enough... I consider that all propaganda. Anyone acting with an agenda, especially when they're trying to persuade without openly disclosing their agenda. Even more so, there's plenty of people who post stuff (like the fringe violence or whatever) who aren't necessarily psyops, but then the algo can promote it in a way that influences people. And I know this can all be done gradually and subtly.
But you should do a deep dive on tiktok if you aren't already on it! It's almost all fun/bizarre/educational videos. When you have so many people (lawmakers) critiquing it who don't use it regularly, it all just comes across as McCarthyism.
(edited to remove a sentence I started and didn't finish)
Because I'm not fancying getting what they deserve together with them. Some brainless zoomers might be casually destroying the West and causing our doom, but I don't want to suffer from their stupidity. I would rather limit their fun than my life.
An interesting phenomenon is people in the US who already got manipulated, and then spread the manipulation from within the US, eagerly and voluntarily, as US citizens
While you lost cred at “partially owned and controlled by the CCP”, I’ll bite. You seem to have knowledge that those at TikTok USDS (and TikTok Inc.) do not. Please share your data/sources on how the “CCP influences the content shown to American “zoomers””.
There’s a similar operational and data island for UK TikTok users as part of project Clover. Share your data on how the CCP is manipulating content shown to UK users while you’re at it.
At the end of the day, my opinion is that after all the changes made to segregate and protect US users this is now all political theater and posturing, and potentially setting a very dangerous precedent.
On the one hand, leaving the potential for CCP propaganda to reach citizen's eyes can be a threat model for insurgency. On the other hand, leaving it monitoring the data coming in, then earmarking when there's an uptick in "flagged" packets or whatever could be a valuable heuristic. It all depends on the point of view.
The US government working with social media companies to censor Americans (and other people) on those platforms is also pretty bad, yes. My impression is that their influence is much weaker and more marginal than is the case with the CCP and tiktok, though. But I would be sympathetic to other countries banning US social media on the ground of US govt influence.
How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?
You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.
Fox News and MSNBC are propaganda for American political parties not foreign governments. They have a much stronger constitutional argument for 1st Amendment protection than Russia Today or China Central TV would.
The US government absolutely has its own government run media outlets such as Voice of America and foreign governments do ban them. For example, the Taliban has attempted to ban VOA in Afghanistan:
No, it's owned & controlled by an American family (from Australia), has its headquarters in New York City and is not beholden to any foreign governments.
Whatever you think of our home-grown propaganda outlets, the US govt taking different approaches to foreign outlets should be uncontroversial. Unlike the CCP, US citizens have first amendment rights.
Bullshit. This isn't "conservative politics". This is right-wing hate behind the thinnest veil of "political entertainment".
They don't really talk about small government or fiscal conservatism anymore. They talk about the "threat" that is posed by LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
I can't even talk to my own father anymore without him getting angry. Angry about nothing. That's one of millions of very real relationships that have been very directly damaged by Fox News. They don't get to do that, then just shrug it off as it it's an accident, and not their primary business model.
Dude, you are very angry and I'd suggest you readjust.
My father watches fox news 24/7. I used to be angry like you anytime we touched close to politics. Now, I just don't talk about it, it's not worth it and doesn't add any value to the relationship, and never did before.
Hopefully you'll see this as you get older. Fox news didn't damage your relationship, sorry.
Ah yes, the "don't talk about politics" approach. The one fundamental/procedural union of all with all, the thing that wretches all of us out from tribal/segregated animal existence. The biggest decision tree impacting our planet and the universe at large. That thing? Yeah just ignore it, if dad thinks killing the gays should be part of the law and I don't...well ya know, let's just lobotomize ourselves psychically so we never have to broach the truths of morality, ethics, justice, and never discuss the two paths humanity and walk down. Very well. Leave it to the others, what do we know anyways, it's not like we can do anything...
I don't talk about it either. He insists we talk about it, or he silently stews over the lack of engagement, while disengaging from everyone else in the room. Sure, it didn't destroy our relationship, but I'm not going to pretend everything is just as good as it was 6 years ago: it's not.
That's just one personal example, too. You would be hard-pressed to find a random 20-minute span of the Fox News network where the primary subject of discussion isn't hate or fear. Very rarely is the primary subject actually a political position. Fox News is a constant barrage of why you should be afraid of and angry at the very existence of every person who has interests or goals that don't match the interests and goals of a right-wing transphobic christian nationalist.
Even if it were about presenting and supporting the political position of right-wing transphobic christian nationalism, it would be better. Fox News does not focus on any political position. Instead, they focus on the engagement of fear and hate that implies that position.
I'm not too worried about their opinion. I just want to do what I can to show people the reality of the situation. Fox News doesn't get to maximize the engagement of its audience and minimize the engagement of its critics.
I think when dealing with 'the other side' so to speak, a good many of us (me included) are against the forces of shear ignorance, scientific illiteracy, undo/thinly veiled racism, and a general disunion amongst men (a war of all against all). I certainly wouldn't put you in this category, but you must admit your original comment came in hot, which instinctively makes people put their shields up. I hope we can all be like the Buddha, but for me, it's exceedingly hard to embody
If you really care about who spies on who, check with AIPAC and similar groups that said that openly, and no one gave a dime.
TikTok is less censored compared to FB, Instagram, X.com etc..
Look how many Israel supporter funded this action (banning/buying Tiktok) Always look for the one with most interest in having Tiktok controlled, you will know who are are the lobbyistes behind. (Follow the money)
It's a peeve of mine when people talk about the "CCP" like this, almost universally in a negative context--like they're trying to invoke the specter of communism in a scary way. Maybe you didn't mean it that way? Why say "CCP" rather than just "China"?
Maybe because not all of China supports the CCP's goals, means, and ideology? Substantial numbers of people disagree with some or all of those, and nobody gets to influence the CCP so it hardly represents anyone besides Party members. (And even some of those have serious disagreements.)
A majority of right-wing Boomers get their news from sources controlled by corporation and politicians interested in overthrowing a legit government and could therefore be considered a threat to national security.
I could be convinced that banning both would be good.
Buddy if some meaningful proportion of your population is finding foreign propaganda convincing, your problem isn’t foreign propaganda.
USA in terminal decline and, in typical fashion, it flatly refuses to look at itself and wonder why. American power elite has no one to blame but itself.
This is a common misunderstanding of what the first amendment means.
Speech and individual expression are individual rights and not institution rights. Perhaps you have some argument with "freedom of press" but that's a pretty hefty uphill battle for TikTok to prove that they are press and not just a random social media business.
Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"
The interstate commerce law gives congress the power to make laws that regulate businesses (that operate over state boundaries). That power includes things like outright banning a business for pretty much any reason.
> Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"
That's misunderstanding what law is. An individual can be tried for fraud just as a business. It doesn't have anything to do with freedom of speech.
You can restrict businesses from saying things beyond what individuals can say.
For example, the FCC prevents public broadcasters from saying "fuck" on the air. Yet you can yell "Fuck the police" over and over again and be protected by the first amendment. There are words and speeches that can't be aired on public TV.
There are other instances of this. A publicly traded business cannot, for example, has to be careful with public statements. There are things they can't say while the stock market is open (such as announcing a merger). Yet an individual has no such restrictions on their free speech. The closest analogy would be preventing individuals from inciting a riot or issuing calls for violence.
And that underlines that free speech in the US has limits (and always has). About the only speech that is pretty much fully protected is political speech, but as I said, even that falls a bit short as you can get in hot water if someone uses your political speech as inspiration for violence.
TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.
No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:
It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.
If you honestly believed this to be true, you would be arguing for a ban on all social media, as like half of Instagram is just reposts of TikTok content and is otherwise mind-numbingly equivalent to the service.
I believe it to be true and I'd like broad, heavy restriction of algorithmically targeted content but that would go against the interests of massive companies. Not gonna happen. I'll take the win in this instance though, where national security concerns and congress' desire to look like it's doing something align to make a small positive change.
How is this a win at all though? Especially now. Every kid I know says Reels is a perfectly good alternative now (it wasn't two years ago). It's making a statement about something, but it's not helping any of the problems you noted.
You don't seriously believe that social media is analogous to the printing press, do you? Because it's not, and it's so obviously not that I'm having trouble imagining what point you were trying to make relative to 1A. Because this isn't a 1A issue either, and it never has been.
If you must, this is like destroying foreign radio towers or something, where those radio towers have the ability to algorithmically predict what people want to listen to and then generate content tuned to affecting their state of mind, what they believe, and so on. So, yeah, blow 'em up.
both things spun the world as we knew it as humans into chaos in one way or another, but despite the metaphor floating around this thread the printing press and social media are not equivalents.
And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic. There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
these days instagram is much more used by older people than tiktok which has a large younger audience. Also scale wise, tiktok is crazy huge, so yes there is a difference between the two offerings
> And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic
In my experience the people who lead with this non-argument tend to be the most privileged. It's always nice talking down to other people of color, isn't it.
> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
>> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
> Demonstrably false.
Ageeed.
I put Reels on the bottom of the short content platforms - TokTok, Shorts, then Reels.
If you haven't used these platforms a lot, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Reels is boring. Everything it shows me, no matter how much I use it, always sucks. I lose interest in minutes. Shorts is decent but mostly just marketing for a channels main brand, but still gets boring after a little use or I'm back in the main tab. TikTok - where did the time go?
TikTok Live is also quite unique, never before I have I experienced other peoples lives so up close and (politely) invasively. Such a strange feeling seeing some family in India making clay cups, or the (Eastern European?) tile guy grinding for hours, or the loading dock somewhere where people are sliding massive blocks of ice around, or the Australian DJ on his balcony - while I'm across the world laying in bed at 3am.
Our Constitution also says, "The Congress shall have Power [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations."
Forcing a sale of TikTok so it's not foreign (with a punishment of banning if they don't), especially while making no such law for U.S. controlled competitors, is no more an infringement upon free speech than introducing a tariff or trade restriction on German-manufactured printing presses while leaving domestic models untouched.
EU is doing similar with anti-trust rules and rulings. It is their right to regulate commerce in their jurisdiction, even if that means fining Apple based on world revenue/profits rather than EU revenue/profits.
Or China! China has definitely prohibited American companies from reasonably operating in the US. Reciprocity there makes sense but it does seem that this sort of reciprocity is going further than China had, no?
If they passed a law requiring US companies operating in Europe to divest their ownership in those subsidiaries or be banned from operating there then that would be their right as a government. Isn’t the EU rather famous at the moment for forcing foreign businesses to comply with their laws and regulations? e.g. GDPR
That said, so long as you don't have data centers in the country, what can they realistically do to stop you if you have a VPN?
There's nothing illegal w.r.t a private citizen trying to circumvent censorship afaik. If you're trying to use illegal content or services (hitmen, drugs, child porn, non us compliant crypto such as finance etc), then I can see the retribution, but unless you go full middle east/CCP people will still get access to and repost it
How many times do we see the government trample on our rights behind “safety”?
I’m fully with you on this. If TikTok is harmful, spread the word and let people make that decision for themselves. If kids are too small to make that decision, that falls on the parents. Don’t take away my rights because others can’t vet companies and use their brains if they should use the apps these companies put out.
What rights is it taking away? TikTok will still exist, you will still be able to get to it on the internet. All this bill does is force a sale OR prevent American companies from platforming technology from adversarial nations (something every government does all the time... see the US and Huawei or limiting Nvidia exports to china etc).
You'll still be able to download the app from the internet (just not an App Store) or browse it on your phone on the internet. We aren't putting up a 'great firewall' or anything
My mistake then, but what’s the point then? Won’t they come for the website next if TikTok doesn’t sell? I don’t even use TikTok but I know this law will be precedence for other laws blocking outside websites.
The only way to ban TikTok is with a network firewall. US can ban local web hosting and even DNS (see pirate media sites), which might be enough to destroy the "network effect" of the site's popularity.
But has US ever banned an IP address or routing?
Well for one, it could force the sale to a non adversarial nation. Two, if it doesn't it undercuts the companies ability to deliver it on American app platforms, both of which are a positive from the viewpoint of the US government.
We have laws against foreign ownership of broadcast TV and radio. Our legal system already acknowledges that foreign ownership of the media is a bad thing that should be prevented. The problem is that these laws haven't been updated for the modern era. TikTok is not covered.
But this due to a failure of our politicians to respond to the modern era, not because the bill of rights enshrines or applies to foreign companies.
That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen in order to start FOX in the 80s. This then enabled him to build FOX News with the specific intent to become the media arm of the Republican party, by tapping Roger Ailes as the first and guiding CEO. Ailes had already worked on media campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, often credited as a major factor in their victories. So he got to run the day to day of the party's new media arm.
Murdoch himself was an international operator who wanted political power for the benefits rather than the ideology. This is demonstrated by the much more liberal leanings in Australia when that was the party willing to grant him power.
What could the impacts be today, if FOX News was owned by the CCP instead of an Aussie of negotiable political virtue?
The law in the US is that you can't make radio transmissions on TV / AM / FM frequencies without a license, because left unchecked, everyone doing what they want would make radio useless for everyone. The government has a clear reason to require licenses, and they have the power to restrict who can receive one.
The Internet doesn't work like that, though. No license is required to make a website or mobile app, because websites and mobile apps don't interfere with each other. The government wouldn't have a very strong argument to require websites to have a license, because they have no reason for doing that other than in moderating the content of the website, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
In the past, TV licenses were absolutely used to censor viewpoints the government didn't like, but now that is no longer possible, because nobody cares about TV or radio. You can bring in whatever content you want from anywhere in the world, thanks to the Internet. That is what the government is salty about; they are losing control because people don't care about TV anymore.
(I'll also point out that shortwave radio still exists. You can tune your radio to, say, 5910kHz and listen to CCP propaganda all day, and there is nothing the US government can do about it. On the flip side, we have Voice of America for a reason. We like broadcasting American propaganda into China just as much as China likes the reverse. Unfortunately, nobody listens to shortwave radio anymore. That's what the US is mad about; people like TikTok, but they don't have anything like it.)
I was referring to the section of the Telecommunication Act that limits foreign direct investment to a 20% ownership stake (which ups to 25% with FCC approval for anything more if a holding company is used).
I'm not sure I communicated my point clearly though, because I agree that the old laws do not apply because they haven't been updated to work with the internet era. I do know how the internet works, though, and that you can get data from 'anywhere'.
Nobody would really care about the issue, though, if there weren't ways to make it more difficult to operate. Banning from the app stores doesn't prevent people from watching TikTok, but it makes it more difficult. They'll get fewer users if they need to side-load a native app or use a PWA, and a significant revenue dip from blocked advertising from PWA or browser views. This gives competitors an artificial advantage that network effects can solidify in time.
But the point I was trying to make is, the US should address their failure to keep legislation up-to-date with national security objectives, rather than single out a single company.
Rather than stick-up jobs on random international corporations, eg 'Sell to our country, OR ELSE', they should have created legislation with privacy laws that apply Congress' concerns to all companies, perhaps with stricter rules for international companies. A review process and penalties could result in forced removal from the app store. This could have _prevented_ TikTok's data collection by defining a clear line they're not allowed to cross. And if they still crossed the line, their app could be removed without it clearly being biased.
Now, the stated concern (privacy violations and data transferred to China) are likely not the only problem. We would have to update the old laws and go beyond simply checking for foreign ownership. The law would need to directly address the same issue that the old law was written for (potential abuse by a foreign entity). The privacy laws would need to be there. But we'd need to also build a process enabling review of algorithmic behavior and manual processes around censorship and propaganda, when companies reach a certain size or market reach. We'd need safeguards to prevent abuse of the law (which will happen, considering the tendency for all of our institutions to come under regulatory capture at some point).
Frankly, I'd prefer if algorithmic ranking system were forced to be opened to the public in a scenario where they gain sufficient audience to cause a significant impact on public discourse, as long as we're rewriting the laws. Some might cringe and cry 'Oh no, what about the intellectual property of that dozen or so megacorps!' And no doubt these companies would also incur expense fighting the gamification of their algorithms. That's just the cost of being so impactful, and it will drive innovation if they can't keep up. And it's the best way to ensure abuses are discovered if we put regulation of censorship and algorithmic abuse in the hands of government organizations.
Basically, we need a framework to systemically address these issues. Not repeated contentious multi-year congressional fights that are triggered on a case-by-case basis. The current haphazard approach _might_ succeed against an occasional bad actor, but it's going to let dozens more through.
All they're doing now is generating talking points during an election year. It's political theatre, not problem-solving.
Is international influence something that should be stopped? Like, I should check the citizenship of someone before I listen to their ideas? It just doesn't make sense to me. If someone tells me nonsense I can ignore the nonsense. It doesn't mean the government should smash their printing press.
It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it?
It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.
> Is international influence something that should be stopped?
This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial.
I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.
I'll try to weigh in. Democratic republics like the USA are heavily swayed by people, protests, etc. In the digital age, just-in-time censorship of social media like Facebook or Twitter have been extremely effective at preventing "good/bad" protests, and each government sets the rules for the social media in the country (read easy censorship). Additionally, there have been a number of international propaganda campaigns that were successful to disrupt regular elections in the USA recently. See evidence of certain protests getting huge right before and during the russo-ukrainian conflict and covid shutdowns. Tik tok the platform's users generally contribute and consume as a "community that generates content in good faith" (I use that definition loosely), but it is a arm of soft CCP power that could just-in-time promote something terrible (brainstorming here: cultivate civil-war-esque mindsets then trigger, convince the population to avoid polio vaccines, etc.) Elections are tumultuous enough without having each "town square" potentially weaponized by potentially hostile nations, so requiring that free press be free from foreign control (influence is okay under free speech) is what is being decided here.
If American democracy goes down because of "foreign influencers" from platforms like TikTok then it means that it wasn't all that strong to begin with.
I stand by my point, if half of the population can be ideologically "switched"/manipulated by a smartphone app then the original ideology (I would assume liberal-democracy in the case of US) wasn't that heavily implanted to begin with.
The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
What if the US and most other countries have always been sheepishly easy to manipulate -- but it wasn't noticeable, until modern tech like FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok appeared?
It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own).
> that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?
That's a great start, but it's only as valid as an activist judicial branch says it is. If congress passes a law that goes against the reading of that old parchment, someone brings a case that works its way to SCOTUS, then they vote based on the vacation they are provided, then the law is declared valid. If they decide it is not, then it is not. It doesn't matter what some armchair critic of the law thinks. They can tweet and tweet, they can blog and blog, they can vent on forums, but unless they become POTUS in a term where you get to sit 1/3 of the bench, you've got no real shot at changing it. Doesn't matter if you lean left or right, a single POTUS sitting 3 judges is rare enough to not consider it a real possibility. So an activist bench can cause disruption for decades/generations.
You talk about lowest common denominator but that's kind of always been a core issue.
Imagine an enlightened and advanced technological culture that refuses to fight. For all their advancements and liberal policies they're still open to being obliterated by another culture that doesn't really care about the whole "war is bad" thing.
I think as society/morals/ethics/law advances, we still need protections in place for "how could somebody exploit this if they don't play by the same rules that we do".
We'll always, unfortunately, still need a person with a large stick and the threat of violence even in a peaceful society.
The US constitution is for the people in the US. Chinese companies don't apply. If you want to grant freedom of speech protection under the US constitution for TikTok, then TikTok must be owned by US people.
You still have freedom to read. You will still be able to access TikTok if they choose not to sell. This is not a firewall block on TikTok, it is a business restriction on operating within the US. It simply bars US companies from hosting TikTok services or distributing the TikTok app.
> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.
Printing presses can't spy on the readers of the paper that goes through them[1]. I think there's a first amendment argument to be made here, but this is way too far out on the absolutist end of the spectrum, not least because this bill doesn't actually regulate TikTok's speech, only who's allowed to own it.
Commercial speech is regulated in thousands of ways already in ways much more effective than this bill. If you really believe in free speech absolutism[2] the fights to be had are elsewhere.
Algorithmic content is not free speech. The government can't make Facebook censor this message or that message, but they can certainly restrict the usage of algorithmic content feeds - that is not protected by the first amendment. I'm not just talking about Tiktok either, this is the issue they should be legislating on, and it should target all social media companies.
There is also legislation giving them to right to regulate foreign ownership of companies. It's scary how much of our stuff is owned by foreign governments. Seems like a national security risk.
How is "developing an algorithm" which selects content any different than editorial free speech? It selects content to show, and transmits that content to its users. Newspapers do this all the time, they pick the stories which get run.
Honestly curious of your take. The only difference that I see is that it can be done at scale, which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't free speech. They just have a bigger megaphone.
Algorithms aren't protected by the US Constitution, that's ridiculous. Point me to the single person who wrote the Facebook algorithm and I will change my opinion and protect its' speech. The press is explicitly protected by the first amendment. Beyond that, commercial speech is not broadly protected. Megaphones, in general, are not free speech.
And we know this. You cannot advertise cigarettes on TV, cities can ban billboards, and until recently, the law understood that donating millions of dollars to a politician is not a form a speech - it's a bribe (we'll have to work on that one).
The press has a protected right to report. Even the press that are really thinly-veiled propaganda outlets get this protection. You have a protected right to speak in public and petition the government for redress without fear of reprisal. Social media and content algorithms are neither the press nor individual citizens, and they are not covered by the language or spirit of the first amendment.
The US Constitution guaranties US citizens rights not the general population of the Earth. Our government has no way to enforce or protect rights from entities outside of the US (other than force). If as you say it is just a "giant printing press" then ownership is irrelevant - change it and print away. If on the other hand the Chinese government has a vested interest in influencing what 136 million Americas consume as information - it will probably stay under a Chinese Government sphere of influence by order of the Party.
>I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue.
I don't disagree currently, but it certainly could be used for that. Due to the invisible hand of the algorithm, it would also be hard to know if a topic was trending naturally, or if TikTok was pushing a viewpoint. Setting aside the issue of whether or not TikTok should be banned, do you agree with the potential propaganda concerns?
I don't think the US Constitution gives the Chinese Communist Party Freedom of Speech. They're generally freedoms that apply to US citizens in the US, no?
> I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes.
Chinese approval of their government is much higher than most Western regimes including the US. I think you are right about how we ought to apply the 1st amendment here, but I don't find that Chinese propaganda is any more insidious or pervasive than American. We just manage it differently: in China the state directly controls the media, while in the US business interests directly control the state and the media.
> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment.
I don't think the First Amendment would allow you to use a printing press built out of embargoed components, or arsenic compounds.
The ban isn't on speech. It's on the platform/product, how it's built and distrbuted, and (correctly or not) perceived ways it harms society.
You can have a short-form vertical video app focused on an algorithmic recommendation feed, and you can say whatever you want on that service. But it seems Washington doesn't want it to be sending data and money overseas to the PRC.
> The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead".
The US constitution gives foreign governments the same rights that it gives its own citizens?
…Okay. It actually may or may not give US citizens the "Right to Receive Foreign Speech", without conferring any rights onto the foreign entities themselves, but that's still very much an open question. Here's 50 pages (that I haven't read) on the matter, if you're into it:
At the end of the day, what this law is asking for is a Great Firewall around the US, that prohibits which websites its citizens can visit. I do not want that, even if China's market practices are unfair. The cure is worse than the disease.