There's an arguable national security angle. Potential surveillance, and, especially, manipulation and dumbing-down.
Earlier, I also heard complaints about TikTok implications for individual health. Which, when implying US Big Tech social media as an acceptable alternative, sounds like an abusive parent: "If anyone's going to beat up my kids, it'll be me!"
Sounds like US Big Tech might've decided on the complaint angle of "some other country could spy on people" -- since all the other valid complaints about TikTok, including intimate surveillance, also apply to TikTok's counterpart US Big Tech products.
Outlaw the irresponsible behaviors, not the competition.
For example if representational content of people falling in love with Osama Bin Laden is a total of 3 hours of content, and there are a billion hours of guitar playing good ole American BBQ content, TikTok can show the 3 Bid Laden hours to most people and 0.0000005% of the American BBQ content.
War through means we haven't figured out yet.
Because we did it in 1934 [1]. There were no Soviet TV channels.
IMO the real threat the US perceives isn't TikTok manipulating information, but them not manipulating it. Look up information about the Gaza War on YouTube and you'll be inundated with various sources promoting a uniformly pro-Israel narrative. The relatively low views on these hits (no recommendation had more than 400k views) for such a hot topic, with premium placement in the search results, suggests it's not resonating or organic, to say the least. But that's because, again, I don't think the goal is to actually get people to watch this and suddenly start cheering on Israel or whatever. Rather, I think the idea is to encourage people to think that they hold a minority view, and motivate them to self censor their own views and opinions. And that's pretty hard to do when you have this massive 'uncontrolled' site openly allowing people to express their wrongthink, and it not being artificially downranked.
I encourage everyone to try this out in a private tab to see how untrue this is.
We have Russia Today in the US. We have CGTN. Both are okay because their viewership isn't sufficient to challenge the pro-Israeli propaganda put out by the MSM.
Even Mitt Romney admitted a lot of the pressure to ban TikTok came from the pro-Israel lobbyists: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/tiktok-ban-china...
What pro-Israeli propaganda is the "MSM" putting out? Because all the pieces on the current invasion of Gaza I've been seeing have had a strong undercurrent of "what the fuck are you doing Israel?"
We’ll still have TikTok.com even if Bytedance refuses to sell.
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(A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
(B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
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That is strongly suggestive of the creation of a national firewall, or a defacto national firewall where internet service providers have to abide a Federal censorship list or face legal consequences. This is one of the many things, like the Patriot Act, that people are going to look back in a decade wondering why they ever thought this was a good idea. Well actually they'll probably just convince themselves that they never supported it - much easier.
[1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
I'm not a TikTok user, but over the long weekend was around people that clearly are. The things they discussed we so outlandish that I was confused on where they got their information. Of course it was a lot of TikTok and YouTube being used as sources.
Personally, I'm much less concerned by any potential surveillance tool. However, the especially part of your sentence is much more worrying to me.
> Outlaw the irresponsible behaviors,
By this do you mean people posting utter nonsense? At that point, you verge on censorship. I recognize that free speech includes speech I don't like, but holy shite batman!, I've never seen such an effective tool for the crazies to find not just a voice with a megaphone but a 30,000w sound system where ever they go. Oh, and they are monetarily rewarded for behaving that way.
So other than slippery slope reasons, I couldn't careless if TikTok were to no longer exist. The net negative of it existing is not worth it in my opinion.
did people not believe crazy things in the mid-20th century? i remember that polling suggests that a third of people believe they have literally spoken with the dead
> did people not believe crazy things in the mid-20th century?
Why is that even a question? Of course the crazy was around. It was just much more difficult to spread it around. You had 'zines that were available. You had AM and shortwave radio programs. Just by telling someone you listened to AM/shortwave content already set people in the correct frame of mind of where the information was obtained. In modern times, it's everywhere on the socials. It just so happens the time the socials were gaining usage with people that specifically do not know critical thinking nor have been taught the ways to investigate sources.
The internet as been an equalizer for everyone doing anything. As much as it has done for retail, it has also been huge for not just the conspiracy theory sites but propaganda from anyone including foreign actors.
Big Tech aren’t Chinese. There is no public coalition civically engaged against Big Tech’s surveillance. There is a solid bloc concerned about China.
If you want to regulate surveillance capitalism—and I do—convince people to care about the issue (and call their electeds and vote).
But the people being targeted by the platform are all watching videos telling them how their votes don't count, the deep state, and other things to encourage people to believe the system does not work. It is the absolute ultimate anti-democratic tool I have ever seen.
Sure, but they have the right to self select out of the civic process (as well as to hear and repeat such things). I wouldn’t support this bill if TikTok.com were going to be blocked; the speech still has a right to the light of day.
A foreign nation wants to ban it because it doesn’t serve its interest, this foreign nation happens to buy up all our politicians.
ALso, the bill doesn't ban Tiktok. It forces Bytedance to sell Tiktok to a US controlled entity so the US security state can more easily threaten them and force them to censor their anti-imperialist content.
The only reason they would go through with burning the company down is for geopolitical reasons, which would show how beholden Tiktok is to the CCP and confirm one of the arguments for passing the bill in the first place.
No, it does not. (It requires sale to a non-foreign adversary controlled person. A sale to an Indian, South African or Brazilian company would be fine.)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/tiktok-ban-china...
https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
> Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
They want those voters. Again, most people who called their electeds and have a voting record seemed to mention China, at least in New York, Arizona, Wyoming and California, where I know some of the folks.
>strip down like 50% from overall content because it is not in line with CCP's ideology?
Of course, play by same rules/guidelines as domestic players. Will also have advantage in offering filtered content from abroad vs domestic players, also will gain a shitload of unique content from PRC net. Many of interesting content producers in PRC if Google leverages AI to transcribe, translate, dub. Plus handover dissident information, but thats table stakes. And eventually get pressured to block antiPRC rags like FLG media globally or be put on sanction/unreliable entity list.
Google and facebook are allowed to participate in the chinese market. If they follow chinese rules. One of them being storing chinese data in china which google and facebook refused to do.
Why are microsoft, apple and other tech companies allowed to do busy in china? Because they follow chinese laws.
> Strip down like 50% from overall content because it is not in line with CCP's ideology?!
As opposed to stripping content to line up with israeli ideology, european ideology or anyone else's ideology?
Other than hypocrisy, do you have a point?
How can that be reconciled with abridging the freedom of speech of millions of citizens by requiring that their preferred press must only controlled by the government's preferred owners?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
I think it won't.
By “preferred owners” you mean literally anybody not from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia or Venezuela [1]. Anyone in America, Europe, most of the Americas, most of Asia, and all of Africa. (Oz can come too.)
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
There isn’t. There is a category of foreign adversaries. It’s negative selection, not positive. “Preferred owners” would be the U.S. government requiring joint venturing with a hand-picked JV partner. Like Beijing.
Phase 1: restricted if from China
Phase 2: restricted if influenced by China
Phase 3: restricted if sympathetic to China
Phase 4: China isn’t the only bad thing for America. If you have the following ideas, those are just as dangerous. “Speech is violence.” Also “silence is violence.”
This has been lived out in front of our eyes so many times.
If you’re referring to McCarthyism, note that his House Un-American proceedings lost steam when they were thrown out by the courts [1]. (It was also limited to government employment, where the state has more power.)
Otherwise, this is just a slippery-slope argument that can be used against any regulation, including the First Amendment.
I am not contesting that the first amendment fails to name TikTok. I’m contesting that the first amendment does not protect your right to own media distribution channels.
We have laws that limit ownership of distribution channels already.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...
This legislation was overwhelmingly bipartisan supported and placed under national security, in an election year, whose court case will happen by Dec. 6 in order to seek review from the Supreme Court if needed before Jan 19th ban. But the election is 1 month prior.
That this most likely will become an election issue where republicans and democrats can 'be on the same page' about and show some unity.
[1] - https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/half-support-banning-tiktok-2024...
Which means the public can make it an issue if it wants to.
That's what I'm saying, it's highly probable that it will be.
I’m sceptical, but not confidently so. The demo that would have been relevant has significant overlap with voters who will never vote for Trump or Biden. Unless they can mobilise convincingly down ballot, they’re for practical purposes out of the race.
