The US Banning TikTok Would Play Right Into China’s Hands, And Destroy Decades Of US Work On Promoting An Open Internet
from the why-can't-american-politicians-think-one-step-ahead? dept
Apparently, the TikTok ban bill is back.
Speaker Mike Johnson plans to include TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the chamber is set to clear on Saturday. The Senate is expected to quickly take up the measure, and President Joe Biden promised Wednesday to sign it immediately.
If signed into law, the bill would deliver a significant blow to a video-sharing app used by as many as 170 million Americans. Its enactment would also mark a major setback to the company’s intense lobbying efforts, especially by Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew, who made the rounds on Capitol Hill last month in a bid to get the Senate to squelch the legislation.
I’ve already explained why the TikTok ban is both unconstitutional and would not do anything to fix the “concerns” that people have raised about it. We’ve also discussed how those most vocally pushing for the TikTok ban appear to be financially conflicted.
But, even more important than all that, is that a TikTok ban would be a disaster for the open web. Yes, other countries have banned apps, but they tend to be authoritarian countries that have never liked and never supported an open web.
Banning an entire app in the US would be a massive attack on the very concept of an open web. And that’s really unfortunate, given that the US used to be the world’s most vocal supporter of the web being kept open and free.
The New York Times recently had a good article calling out what a disaster the ban would be for the open web.
Digital rights groups and others around the world have taken notice — and raised the question of how the moves against TikTok contradict the United States’ arguments in favor of an open internet.
A Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, posted on social media last month that Russia could use the move to shut down services like YouTube. And digital rights advocates globally are expressing fears of a ripple effect, with the United States providing cover for authoritarians who want to censor the internet.
In March, the Chinese government, which controls its country’s internet, said America had “one way of saying and doing things about the United States, and another way of saying and doing things about other countries,” citing the TikTok legislation.
Passing the TikTok ban would effectively be telling the world (1) it’s totally okay to ban apps you don’t like, and (2) the U.S. long-standing commitment to the open web was always fake and always bullshit, because the second a successful foreign app came along, we tossed out those principles.
“It would diminish the U.S.’s standing in promoting internet freedom,” said Juan Carlos Lara, the executive director of Derechos Digitales, a Latin American digital rights group based in Chile. “It would definitely not bolster its own case for promoting a free and secure, stable and interoperable internet.”
And that signal will be heard loud and clear around the world:
Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer who founded the New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center, said the Indian government would also use a U.S. ban to justify further crackdowns. It has already engaged in internet shutdowns, she said, and it banned TikTok in 2020 over border conflicts with China.
“This gives them good reason to find confidence in their past actions, but also emboldens them to take similar future actions,” she said in an interview.
Mr. Lara of Derechos Digitales noted that countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua had already passed laws that gave the government more control over online content. He said increased government control of the internet was a “tempting idea” that “really risks materializing if such a thing is seen in places like the U.S.”
A forced sale or ban of TikTok could also make it harder for the American government to ask other countries to embrace an internet governed by international organizations, digital rights experts said.
And, if the goal here is to hurt China in particular, that may backfire massively:
Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the TikTok measure became law, the “hypocrisy would be inescapable and the dividends to China enormous.”
China has long made a big deal whenever the US government is hypocritical like this. This would be a huge PR win for the Chinese government. It would allow it to claim that its Great Firewall approach to the internet is right, and that the US was admitting that openness and an open internet fails. It would allow China to call out US hypocrisy, and that matters a lot at this moment when China is working hard to build stronger relationships with lots of countries around the globe.
Banning TikTok won’t help the US against China. It will play right into China’s hands. It doesn’t need TikTok to get data on Americans, nor to try to influence Americans. But, destroying decades of US foreign policy promoting an open and free internet serves China’s interests massively.
Filed Under: censorship, china, hypocrisy, open internet, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok
Comments on “The US Banning TikTok Would Play Right Into China’s Hands, And Destroy Decades Of US Work On Promoting An Open Internet”
They don’t care. They’ll burn it all for control.
Re:
Sad, but true thing is, you’re not wrong.
Cover for authoritarians
“And digital rights advocates globally are expressing fears of a ripple effect, with the United States providing cover for authoritarians who want to censor the internet.”
I mean, that’s exactly what the US government is doing and has been doing for a while, now. Thing is, that seems to have increasingly become the norm. Which government Isn’t doing that, especially at the time of writing?
Re:
Sad but true fact.
healthcare pls
Re:
Instructions unclear. Outlawed healthcare.
Chinese embassy lobbied congress
No mention of China lobbying Congress behind close doors to stop the ban??? Not sure it ‘plays into China’s hands’ if they are lobbying to prevent the sale. I think TechDirt is being less than fully honest on the TikTok debate.
According to many on TechDirt, there is no relationship between ByteDance and the Chinese government. According to Politico (quoting members on the hill), the Chinese embassy has aggressively pursued members and even referred to ByteDance as a “Chinese company” in attempting meetings.
Re:
‘Oh no Mr. Wolf, please don’t throw me into the briar patch….’
Re:
Unless Reuters verifies the nonsense that Fortune is apparently “reporting” (that is, Tiktok has been doing its best to obfuscate its relationship with its parent company to the point of lying to its employees), it’d be hard to have hard evidence to prove your claim.
Re: Re:
Not my claim…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-lobbies-congress-behind-closed-doors-on-tiktok-staffers-say/ar-BB1lNWh5
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes liberals uncomfortable. That’s why they joined the fascists in making his corpse dance.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
Lovely analysis of white US hypocrisy
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Yeah, he was like that. That’s why they shot him and whitewashed him.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Decades later, Carlin would provide the punch line to King’s “I have a Dream” speech.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
We’ll actually be able to see more of this hypocrisy in action when the Techdirt liberals come through and accuse me of being right-wing.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
trolls are obvious and you are obvious
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
Or maybe you really do suck that much.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:3
are you getting upset over being called a troll?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
And this has…what, exactly, to do with the topic at hand? Like, this is the second time you’ve posted that quote today, and both times, it hasn’t had any clear relation to the actual article on which you’re commenting. Like, it’s a fine quote and all, but still.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Yeah, bro. No link at all between decades of such politics and the consistent bipartisan “fuck-yous” to the American public.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Make up your minds
This is the complete opposite of what’s been reported here on Techdirt. You keep saying how the US government is trying to control and censor the internet, now you’re saying the USA is trying to keep an open internet? Which is it?
Re:
If I’m driving north, and then a take a left turn, have I actually been driving west the whole time?
Re:
The point is that the US government has, for decades, ostensibly been fine with an open Internet. It has even chastised the Chinese government for its Great Firewall in the past. Banning TikTok, regardless of the reason for that ban, would be a reversal of that past support—to the point where China’s leaders could use the ban to justify the Great Firewall by saying “our approach is correct because even the United States is doing it now”.
Re: Re: OPen internet
There is no right for any person to own a corporation operating in another nation’s sovereign territory. You are simply misstating what this is about. China does not recognize private property or the rule of law. Any Chinese corporation, even when operating overseas, is beholden to the CCP. Any foreigner operating in China and interacting with Chinese commerce knows this rule.
Free speech is a right enjoyed by the users, not a right of ownership in corporations, especially not if the owner is a foreign entity.
Re: Re: Re:
If that was the case, three judges (two in separate cases regarding Trump’s 2020 EO, only one of which directly touched the 1A issue while the other did so indirectly through his use of executive trade authority, and the third in the Montana attempt last year) wouldn’t have blocked attempts to ban TikTok already.
The judges determined that the government couldn’t prohibit civilians from accessing TikTok as their preferred medium to exercise speech and expression, and in the former, one of the judges determined that the government’s evidentiary assessment of the platform didn’t prove that there was a grave, immediate threat that warranted a ban, even under the backdoor of trying to facilitate a sale. You can apply less restrictive measures to mitigate a risk (data privacy laws for one), and the high bar that the First Amendment sets for restricting speech generally necessitates the government proving anything short of the most restrictive measures isn’t sufficient.
Re: Re: Re:
Cool! Can we now kick the tax-dodging Starbucks out of the UK? Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.
Re: Re:
Exactly. And, as the article points out, it gives a green light for other authoritarian and backsliding democratic countries to block access to the internet or individual websites, and the U.S. loses any credibility to criticize them for it. This would still be true if the PAFACA were struck down as unconstitutional even by the Supreme Court.
That said, with the various internet laws already being implemented or proposed (whether it be KOSA or age verification laws), we kinda have eroded credibility on the open internet concept as it is, since these laws do infringe on speech and privacy to varying degrees.
Congress is a bunch of snakes.
Why not a stand alone bill? Why not debate it? No we in America have the most selfish corrupt government in history
Re:
This is demonstrably false, to an outright idiotic degree.
Re: Re:
Chinese trolls are out in force to attack the United States always invoking whataboutism. America is corrupt, no better than China, no one has clean hands, blablabla.
Claiming free speech and the open internet in service of a totalitarian genocidal govt. putting Muslims in concentration camps, really something.
Re:
No you haven’t. That award goes to the unelected by the public, the E.U. commission. I know this, I live in the E.U.
Re: Re:
Clown.
This is why we need to eradicate the GOP and impeach, recall or otherwise eliminate all Republicans at every level of government.
They are evil and corrupt!!
Re:
Just take the Gym Jordan locker room approach to the GOP.
If you need practice, watch that video of Richard Spencer getting punched until you just don’t see anything.
Re:
The democrats are about to vote in support of this bile, they aren’t the innocent party here.
Re: Re:
The Democrats are doing what they have to do to defend less productive and more vulnerable Americans. The GOP would just send all these marginalized groups to death camps. I acknowledge it looks weird, but sometimes Democrats have to openly and unreservedly support Republican efforts to abridge constitutional rights in order to protect/enhance/defend/expand those rights later.
Just look at the great work the Biden administration revealed today that they’d undertaken to insert gender identity into Title IX. Without mostly going along with the plan to ban TikTok, the Dems would basically be allowing transgender women to be exterminated.
Re: Re: Re:
What constitutional rights does this divestment requirement violate? Not those of the users. They have the right to speak, but not the right to speak through a specific medium owned by a foreign hostile nation.
Re: Re: Re:2
That’s not how the First Amendment works. 1A case law doesn’t make distinctions as to what medium that the speaker can speak from.
Re: Re: Re:2
And for the avoidance of doubt, there is a huge gulf of difference between the owner of something saying, “I don’t want you speaking on my property,” and the government saying, “We don’t want you speaking on that person’s property even if they’ve invited you to do so.”
Re: Re: Re:
Uhh, no? If the democrats really want to protect minorities and other groups from the GOP they can just do that, at no point are they ‘required’ to help the GOP screw people over just so they can maybe slip in some language that might help.
Re: Re: Re:2
But you don’t understand! The great Saint Biden has to aid and abet the RNC in their fascism, because… He just has to!
Now apologize to him or else you’re a Trump-supporting troll!
Re:
Liberals try to not be the exact same kind of brain-dead cultists as the team they’re “opposing” challenge level: Impossible.
Re: Re:
you try not to confess that your a troll challenge impossible
Re: Re: Re:
D’awww, who’s a “special” one who barely has the mental capacity to move a broom, let alone comprehend a world that doesn’t work entirely on binary?
Did your handler give you an extra gold star sticker today?
When are they going to
Get the line veto, or Paragraph Veto, or
JUST VOTE ON 1 THING PER BILL??
Re:
Congress once passed a law allowing the President to line-item veto, and the Supreme Court quickly ruled it unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York.
Smart idea. Just one problem. House takes up TikTok ban bill independently. It passes the House. It passes the Senate. Biden signs it into law (as he said he would). The TikTok ban would become law even if it was voted on independently.
Re: Re: Used to be
to STOP a bill from passing they would add Legalizing MJ.
And TONS of other THINGS they didnt want.
You’ve addressed how China can buy data elsewhere. You didn’t explain the concerns over influence. You just handwaved them away as saying we hadn’t see evidence of it, and that they would be able to influence via other means.
Y’all haven’t covered it yet, but there is a general data privacy bill starting in the House. Still very early days (and it probably sucks), but it is a step towards addressing that talking point:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/owentedford/2024/04/09/congress-attempts-to-tackle-data-privacy-again/?sh=64dc13d21dc1
(There’s also the more problematic bill banning data sales to China)
I mean, “need” is a strong word. The question is whether it’s an effective tool at doing so, or not. It’s not a crazy argument that TikTok is more effective than something like a PR statement that was used in the past. You can’t really conflate the two.
There is a very strong argument that an open web, and US consistency, is more important than the influence concern. But you haven’t really debunked the concern about influence, at all.
Re:
You can’t “debunk a concern”. People will have a moral panic over whatever they like in service of any number of agendas.
The actual problem, though, is that’s all you have: Concern, and claims. Bring evidence of privacy issues unique to TikTok, and/or influence issues caused by TikTok (while not ignoring the First Amendment). Then others can support or debunk your evidence with additional evidence. That’s how this works. Make a testable claim, then test it, then show your work and the evidence produced by testing. It is no one else’s job to counter things that don’t exist, but lucky you, articles like the one above are already doing just that.
Re: Re:
Well, first of all, no one said “debunk a concern”. But putting that aside, you absolutely can show that the concern is reasonably handled under existing policies or reasonably can’t happen.
People might choose to indulge in a moral panic anyway regardless of debunking, but that doesn’t mean a debunking isn’t doable. Nor is it an excuse not to address reasonable concerns. It’s a massive strawman to conflate the two.
That’s not actually a problem, though.
That’s kind of the problem though, is it’s generally not testable unless you have developer access to TikTok. Hypothetically, lets say TikTok did tweak it’s algorithm to disfavor certain topics. How would you be able to tell, assuming it’s not a hamfisted full ban? It’d be virtually impossible.
Just because it’s not easily testable doesn’t mean it can’t happen or the concern isn’t real. The fact that it’s not verifiable is itself one of the concerns (and a ‘testable one’ concern, strictly speaking, if you want to phrase it that way. We can test whether we can verify something happening on TikTok or not. We can’t.)
You can’t claim that something isn’t a concern simply because it’s been made off limits to test. That’s circular.
I mean, it in fact is. Not only that, that is literally in fact some people’s jobs. It’s absolutely possible to proactively counter potential exploits before they happen. That happens all the times. (And this isn’t even just a hypothetical. Bytedance has proactively done things like it’s deal with Oracle, for instance)
Where it becomes an issue is whether that exploit is something to reasonably be worried about ahead of time or not.
That said, there have been some claims around e.g. Tiananmen (which I brought up in the comments on the previous post here: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/14/once-more-with-feeling-banning-tiktok-is-unconstitutional-wont-do-shit-to-deal-with-any-actual-threats/ )
Re: Re: Re:
But you haven’t really debunked the concern about influence, at all.
Pretty sure that says debunk concerns.
Concerns can be reasonably handled or not. Reasonable concerns – things we have reason to be concerned about, in a specific manner, backed up by evidence – reasonably handled (one can only hope) would be great.
One way you can test this is show real-world consequences or patterns of influence. And that they matter, and are any different from the background noise.
i can’t claim anything isn’t a concern, people will be concerned about whatever. Concern is a state of mind. (Or just as frequently, theatre.)
Treating systems like they are already compromised is how you do security. It isn’t how we address supposed concerns. Infosec people, however, can be concerned and act accordingly, no Congress and political sideshows necessary.
Tiananmen – Forgive me if i don’t dig through 100 comments looking for this.
Re: Re: Re:2
Poor word choice on my part then, I’ll say. But it should be pretty clear from the previous part of the comment, and Mike’s claim, what I’m referring to, here. He’s claiming that he explained why it wouldn’t fix those concerns. I’m saying he explained why it won’t fix the data collection concern (and he’s correct on that end), but he didn’t explain why it wouldn’t fix the influence concern. His argument on the influence side of things is that Americans simply wouldn’t fall for it:
In the US, we’re supposed to believe in freedom of speech, even if that freedom of speech comes in the form of “foreign communist propaganda.” If we survived that same foreign communist propaganda for decades in other forms, it seems like we can survive it coming from an app designed to highlight short videos of dance moves.
I don’t see how he can claim that that explains why it wouldn’t fix it. It’s possible they wouldn’t, but we don’t have evidence either way (and to emphasis, we don’t have evidence that they would fall for it, either). All we can say at this point is that they may or may not fall for it.
I think it’s fair to say, China successfully influencing the U.S. is something we would reasonably be concerned about, if it were happening, right? Emphasis on the if, of course. Everyone seems to agree that if that happened, it would be a problem, but Mike’s argument is that he doesn’t think it would be effective because of the robustness of free speech, so it’s a moot point. Then, the discussion comes down to a) is it actually happening or likely to happen (and if so, would we be able to measure it), and b) if China did try, how effective would it be?
Can we measure a) and b)? If yes, how? And if not, what is the reasonable way to handle that risk of something we can’t easily measure, and why? It seems to me, a big part of this discussion is risk management for something we don’t have much evidence for, either way. (Honestly, the deal with Oracle seemed like a reasonable compromise, and I’m not sure why people aren’t talking about it more, on either side)
I do agree with you, that a lot of it is driven by moral panic. But at the same time, I don’t see how we can dismiss the entire risk as being unreasonable to worry about.
That is one way, yes, and ideally it would be what should be done. But that seems to be assuming that we can easily measure that sort of thing. Can we? Measuring the effect of any sort of individual influence is notoriously hard (see, e.g., arguments over how/if Russia pushed the 2016 election).
Normally, I would 100% agree that it would be best to simply test it. But there’s a bit of an unspoken problem here, which is how difficult it is to test (something I explicitly brought up in my previous comment). If you’re asking for testable hypotheses before acting, that’s something you have to grapple with. And if it’s not testable, there needs to be an argument why inaction is the better form of risk management.
Like I mentioned in my previous comment- Hypothetically, if this were happening, how would you propose testing for it? I don’t really see an effective means of doing so without access to the back end. And the irony here is, a big part of the reason testing can’t be done is because of China’s policies on access to that sort of thing.
This concern is about security, though? I’m not sure what distinction you’re drawing here. That’s why people are taking such a risk management stance to it, despite lack of evidence. That said, I’m not saying we need to treat it as already compromised, but rather that we don’t know either way. Our response should be in light of that lack of information
I don’t see how infosec people would be able to address this problem, as I mentioned previously. If they could, I do think it would be preferable. How are you proposing they do that?
A simple ctrl+F would find it. But sure, here it is (i don’t know if you can link to a specific comment on TD? So just repasting it here):
Didn’t they get caught blocking things like Tiananmen?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing
They’ve since changed the policy, and you can find content on Tiananmen now (not sure about other topics), but it does seem kind of concerning and not a hypothetical. And it’s not like it’s not inline with how the CCP has made demands of corporate organizations like the NBA.
(As a bit of additional clarification, I am/was legitimately asking, it was not a rhetorical question. A lot of the claims around TikTok are sensationalized, I’m not claiming it’s hard proof we need to crack down or anything.)
Re:
Russia doesn’t have a platform in a America and yet it did its best to influence our elections via social media in 2016 and 2020. China can do the exact same thing and is currently doing so, Tik Tok is just one avenue for them to influence reality. Getting rid of Tik Tok eliminates one vector for them to attack from but there are still countless others they can use. Basically getting rid of Tik Tok puts a speed bump in front of China and does little else. A speed bump isn’t going to alter their behavior or stop them from misbehaving.
Re: Re:
One hundred percent agree that it’s only one vector. I’m not totally sure I agree on speed bump- that’s implicitly assuming other vectors are just as effective. TikTok’s reach and control via the algorithm is fairly unique, I’m not sure you can spin that up on a whim. That has some serious advantages compared to traditional propaganda. (However, TikTok is also not some unique mind control device either, as scare mongers like to make it out to be)
That said, I don’t think “well this is only one way” is a good argument to do nothing. Rather, all that really says is that this isn’t enough, alone.
Russia/China are going to be doing whatever they can to influence elections. We should try to blunt that when possible/reasonable. It won’t make them stop, and it won’t make it go away, all you can really do is try to minimize the risk.
Re: Just admit that you don't like 1A
“You’ve addressed how China can buy data elsewhere. You didn’t explain the concerns over influence. You just handwaved them away as saying we hadn’t see evidence of it, and that they would be able to influence via other means.”
Last time I checked, there wasn’t a “foreign influence” exception to the First Amendment.
Not sure of your politics, but thinking that it is OK for the government to legally prevent people from getting access to information via media so they don’t get “influenced” by it is essentially the argument that Right Wingers like DeSantis and Abbott have been making lately. If you are also Right Wing, it makes sense. If you claim that you aren’t, then you are just fooling yourself.
Re: Re:
You should check again. For instance, campaign donations. Those are explicitly considered First Amendment protected by SCOTUS.
Re: Re: Re:
(Comment posted early)
I’m left wing. And I do think that the government preventing access to information is an extremely serious problem, and something that can only be done as a last resort. I am fully admitting this is a serious risk, and I am not downplaying that risk. I’m not even arguing that it should be done- but only that Mike didn’t actually prove what he claimed to prove.
That said, we do have restrictions on speech (e.g., defamation, libel, the previously mentioned campaign donations, threats, etc. None of which are stated explicitly in the 1st amendment). They are extremely limited, but they do exist. We’ve also taken actions against outlets, by making them register under FARA, despite explicitly being expressive content, for instance. As well as other sanctions: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2195#:~:text=The%20fake%20websites%20appeared%20to,impersonated%20site's%20cookie%20acceptance%20page.
I don’t hate the 1st amendment, it’s extremely important. But it’s also not as ironclad as you’re claiming, and never has been. That doesn’t mean it should be used that way, but there’s more going on than “Last time I checked, there wasn’t a “foreign influence” exception to the First Amendment.”
Re: Re: Re:
You should check your understanding. If campaign donations are protected by the First Amendment, then they don’t fall under one of the exceptions to it. You do know what the word ‘exceptions’ means in this context, right?
Re: Re: Re:2
I used to think that foreign influence of any kind in our government was frowned upon because that is what I was told by our esteemed leaders. Too bad they were all lying.
The latest election cycle has shown the world, if one were looking, that some of our political leaders and heads of state are quite comfortable with taking money and direction from foreign entities. Their My Way or the Highway attitude is so yesterday that it should wake up a few sleeping voters. If one were to describe the news of today to an average person ten years ago, they would think yer crazy.
Re: Re: Re:2
Domestic campaign donations are first amendment protected. Ones by foreign governments are not.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/foreign-nationals/
Federal law prohibits contributions, donations, expenditures(including independent expenditures) and disbursements solicited, directed, received or made directly or indirectly by or from foreign nationals in connection with any federal, state or local election.
I can see this also coming back to bite the US, What happens if the EU show up and demands that Musk must sale X/Twitter?
Re:
The EU vision may be the right one, by imposing interoperability between “apps” (we then should say “protocols”), banning TikTok could been impossible because potentially any app/service could still talk to/with TikTok, even, why not, storing most personal data outside China.
Yet, there is still a lot to do, but I could imagine a world where some 30 years ago, each telco would use there own service with there own phone numbers, and people need to get many phones to talk to each other. Banning some telco would be easy, and what a profit when your get only one of them for a city or even a country.
There's shooting your own foot and then there's calling in an air strike on it...
US Government: And about your latest attempt to control speech on the internet-
Foreign Governments from this point onward: Points to TikTok ban
US Government: … I’ll just show myself out shall I?
Re:
I could see this being the point that the us realizes they got played.
Re:
You think the U.S. Government cares about getting called-out for its hypocrisy (and evilness)??
We’re all complicit in America’s ongoing crimes against the world if we don’t start attacking the uni-party w/ more than strong words and protest votes!!
Re: Re:
You can’t even answer the door for a delivery without almost suffering a mental breakdown, armchair revolutionary.
Re:
Some child thinks this is the first time the U.S. has been overtly hostile towards free speech. Adorable.
Re: Re:
U mad cuz U didn’t think of it first, bro?
Musk is opposed to Tiktok ban
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240419-x-owner-musk-says-opposed-to-us-ban-of-competitor-tiktok
“Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression.”
A number of replies to Musk’s comment on X expressed concern that a TikTok ban would set a precedent that could be used to target other social media and messaging services.
Re:
Knowing him, his opposition most likely has more to do with self-preservation than principles.
Infosec perspective
Several things are true simultaneously:
Re:
6 sadly is true.
Re: Re:
are you gonna say anything but pessimistic words?
Re: Re: Re:
Nope.
Re:
It feels a bit defeatist to say this, but the Democrats (and their leader!) aren’t really any better. They’re just a different flavor of deranged, creepy authoritarians…although for sure more polished.
Idk what to do though. I certainly don’t want to go protest outside of one of Drumpf’s future trials and then light myself on fire. No one would even remember who I was a few days later, and nothing would change.
Why can’t we have a noble leader like Congresswoman Barbara Lee (except acting in not just the capacity of token protest)?? 😞
Re:
It’s not a ban. Stop framing this as censorship. The users can move to other platforms whose ownership structure is more to the liking of Congress. It’s a sovereign nation’s prerogative to control international commerce in order to protect its citizens from harm, defined as everything that is constitutionally within the power of the government to regulate or ban outright.
There is a Foreign Agents Registration Act and ownership rules concerning broadcast media. These do not violate the end users’ right to receive or impart information or to speak on any matter.
Note that it’s only the users residing in the United States who enjoy a First Amendment right. The owners of TikTok, insofar as they are the Chinese government, the CCP, or private Chinese investors, have no constitutional right to own property in the United States or to use their infrastructure to beam information or misinformation to American citizens.
Re: Re:
Tik Tok is not broadcast media, such rules would not apply to them.
FARA is for literal paid K Street style lobbyists, it’s not required for random foreigners to contact Congress and express concerns even if they work for Tencent.
Contract law is what gives property rights to owners not the Constitution. The Constitution prevents the government from fucking with people’s property rights.
It is a ban. It’s moronic to pretend otherwise. Just because people can speak elsewhere doesn’t make it not a ban. We’re shutting down the Taylor Swift show but there’s plenty of other concerts to go see tonight so we didn’t ban Taylor Swift.
Re: Re:
The legislation clearly states that if Bytedance doesn’t divest of TikTok in the revised nine-month timeframe, it will be banned. It is censorship, because it intends to unlawfully restrict protected speech hosted on the platform and prohibit people from using it, in exchange for compliance, the same issue that resulted in Trump’s 2020 EO (using the same concept, albeit with an unlawful use of the IEEPA trade powers) and Montana’s 2023 ban attempt (which was an outright ban that would only be undone once Bytedance sold TikTok) being invalidated by lower court judges. Your claim would have legs to stand on if the ban provision were not included in the legislation, as forced divestiture alone would be legal on its own, but First Amendment case law has established a right to receive material, even if the government disapproves of said material.
Lamont v. Postmaster General applied this standard to a USPS statute the 1965 Supreme Court case invalidated that prohibited distribution of Soviet Communist propaganda through the mail, unless the recipient opted into receiving it, asserting that the government can’t restrict access to propaganda, which can constitute both legitimate disinformation and facts that one elects to believe promote a false narrative because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, hence why regulating propaganda could be an overbroad speech restriction impermissible under the 1A.
Also, the 1A requires the U.S. government to at least balance speech and expression rights when undertaking actions meant to protect Americans from alleged or documented harms. The courts apply the strict/intermediate scrutiny standard to national security laws that conflict with the 1A, and in many cases, have determined that the government interest in such matters would be best served by less restrictive measures; a clean forced sale without the threat of speech suppression and blocking would be less restrictive and pass legal muster, so would mitigative measures like data privacy regulations (which Congress is actually proposing as of this writing) or the stalled proposal to allow the government to monitor TikTok’s algorithm and data flows.
Re: Re:
“We’re not banning the NY Times, stop framing this as censorship. Readers can just get their news from other papers, whose ownership structure is more to the liking of Congress.”
“We’re not banning CNN, stop framing this as censorship. Readers can just get their news from other cable channels, whose ownership structure is more to the liking of Congress.”
“We’re not banning Fox News, stop framing this as censorship. Readers can just get their news from other cable channels, whose ownership structure is more to the liking of Congress.”
The First Amendment does not allow Congress to shut down a media operation over concerns regarding the speech. That’s what this is.
Re: Huh?
“There’s no question that TikTok is a op run by Chinese intelligence and that its principle reason for existence is data/metadata gathering.”
Huh?
Sure, Chinese intelligence spent a bunch of money and time to create an app to collect data … instead of just buying the data (for a lot less money) from all the places where it is available.
Meanwhile children will go hungry while school is out this summer because being poor is a sin in the imaginary christian nation who follow a man who said care for the children & poor unless you need to feel superior.
All of the sins they claim TikTok has done, Congress has done worse. They lie multiple times a day, mislead people, never are held to account, and gather way more data on us than China could with 1 fucking app.
Re:
It’s your fault because you didn’t VOTE HARD ENOUGH.
The fact that Washington hasn’t learned from the court failures of Trump’s EO and the Montana ban attempt shows it doesn’t understand that TikTok is subject to First Amendment protections, in relation to the speech hosted on the platform. We’re just going to waste taxpayer dollars on legislation that may end up being held unconstitutional in the courts, just like those attempts. Clearly, the majority of D.C. doesn’t realize that First Amendment protections apply to a still substantial enough extent to foreign nationals and entities, and many are kidding themselves that they’re not regulating speech (it still counts), especially when they’ve expressed that they have issues with certain content (which would doom it on even intermediate scrutiny grounds, as the 1A doesn’t allow the government to broadly regulate speech based on content, including, as Lamont v. Postmaster General established, propaganda).
The timing couldn’t be worse, because it undermines the message that Biden and Democrats are pro-democracy (especially among young voters, whose speech, expression and, for some, income would be impacted by this law), when being pro-democracy involves standing up for free speech and expression. Backing a law that likely violates the 1A to facilitate a sale of a platform does the opposite, and Democrats could have advocated for eliminating the ban provision so it could stand up in court, instead the majority of them are choosing to cosign on legislation that gives TikTok leverage in court, in the government self-own that Trump’s EO and the Montana ban attempt were subjected to, along with the fact that politicians have been clear content is an issue (also what got the Montana law blocked).
The “ban if you don’t comply with the sale” provision would still be considered an impermissible restriction on speech, and given that TikTok has 150-175 million users, a burdensome restriction that would fail strict scrutiny and, given the government hasn’t provided (and may very well still not have) credible evidence of an immediate threat, likely intermediate scrutiny as well, which is one of the reasons Trump’s EO failed.
Interesting coincidence...
The infamous MPAA is simultaneously pushing for site-blocking.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/17/the-motion-picture-association-doesnt-get-to-decide-who-the-first-amendment-protects/
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/10/hollywood-believes-the-time-is-ripe-to-bring-back-sopa/
There was an extremely close call back in 2022 (the Sdarot case) when a plaintiff got a judge to issue an order ordering every ISP in the US to block several sites. This order was later withdrawn, but it was an extremely close call.
Time for the geezers to go
These rich old fuckers don’t give a shit about the internet. They hated it in the 90s and they still hate it today because it allows people to shine a light on how terrible things are. They want to ban TikTok to control the flow of information. And of course, they knew something this stupid could not pass on its own, which is why they attached it like a tumor to the ass of the aid package.
Re:
which that part is gonna get challenged anyways
I hope they do it and Biden signs it right away like he said he would if only because the insufferable smug twits who keep insisting the DNC is actually not just the same as the RNC but with less overt fascism can start their new song and dance about how it’s actually not at all a bad thing and we should be praising them for doing it instead of their opponents.
Re:
ok low life troll
Re: Re:
I’d love to hear your “thoughts” about the migrants still being abused at the border. Something your kind raged about nearly every day when the previous administration was in but just like magic, went silent the moment another took over but continued the same thing.
I can’t call them actual thoughts because you subhumans aren’t capable of such things.
Re: Re: Re:
and there you go you just proved my point that you are a low tier troll
Re: Re: Re:2
You could save so much time and just tell everyone, “Everyone who doesn’t blame only Trump for everything wrong in the world is a troll!” is the only thing that echos inside the hollow of your skull. Since obviously there isn’t anything up there, the spinal cord is more than enough for your kind.
Re: Re: Re:3
Trump is a SYMPTOM. Blame ignorance, greed, and bigotry. Trump will die one day, but those problems are likely to remain FOREVER.
Re: Re: Re:4
The peanut gallery doesn’t care. They’re fine with Trump’s policy, just so long as it’s done by someone else.
Notice how no one cares about the inhumane treatment of refuges at the southern border or how much farther the erosion of rights has continued since the last election.
Malcolm X warned everybody about this long ago.
What scares me that this become part of the Protecting Internet Communication And Commerce Act (PICCA), menrioned in prophecy years ago
That is why I talk about parking a computer abroad to bypass censorship under the coming PICCA
Free speech, free market…JUST MORE LIES.