I have to say, while on its face I'm open to the thought that a large social media site, which relies on consuming and analyze marketing and training data, and is partly owned by a "competitor" with a very different perspective on personal liberty and government —
Can someone show me the receipts!?
As the author points out, there are these vague claims by now two administrations of different political parties. Or I hear sort of hazy assertions from The Verge that TikTok is doing bad things.
What is the evidence? If we don't have the evidence, why are we still making the murky claims? If we DO have the evidence, why on earth haven't we done something about it yet?
I have to assume I'm really quite ignorant, that there is some reason for the inaction by political leaders, and so I come here genuinely from the standpoint of wanting to learn. Maybe I'm naive in either case! XD
I don’t think there is any evidence because TikTok has not reach the point where it is comfortable doing much of China’s bidding. I think it has done some, like perennial removal/deprioritizing Tiananmen Square videos, but nothing overtly damaging. Because, why do it? It’s just here to make money and sell ads. Doing China’s bidding risks losing money, big no no for business.
All the threats are theoretical, about a future where TikTok is even more ubiquitous. No one can argue against such hypothetical, and would be suicidal for any politician to do so. So, here we are.
Tiktok is defacto doing the CCP's bidding. They don't have a choice not to. There is no rule of law or separation of powers in China. It's not like tiktok can sue the CCP to leave them alone (let alone the idea even come up in the boardroom).
I think this debate would be much clearer if people didn't (probably without even realizing it) think they understand how China works because they understand how American works.
This article fails to ask the only question that really counts: if the President (or Congress) bans TikTok on national security grounds, would the current SCOTUS majority overturn that on the basis of the 1st Amendment? Nobody can know for sure, but personally, I doubt the answer would be “Yes”. The article makes a lot out of how some District court ruled, but District court rulings are close to useless at foretelling how SCOTUS will rule. It also cites some decades old precedents, but ignores that SCOTUS will likely find some way to distinguish the current case from those precedents, rendering them inapplicable.
I agree. I also don't understand the logic of some of those precedents- for example, it's said that shutting down an entire platform based on a limited set of messages is suppressing first amendment rights, but.... 1FA advocates can just pick up their free speech and move it to another platform, it's not like the government is intentionally cutting off the ability to exercise free speech.
but I am not a lawyer and certainly not a constitutional one.
While I am not sympathetic to TikTok, I think you're more observant than most law school graduates about this who have been trained to try and interpret the law as it is, without asking this very Instrumentalist question that is the only one that matters. And who is the President implementing it might matter too.
I didn't read the article, but I don't think it violates the First Amendment as it stands now if they provide a good enough basis grounded in national security. The way people want the Constitution to be, versus how it is, aren't the same thing as you pointed out.
> And who is the President implementing it might matter too.
It might. But, in this case, I think that’s less likely. If Biden tries to ban TikTok, he’ll simply be doing what Trump already tried to do. If both Trump and Biden want something, it ends up looking bipartisan-which increases the odds SCOTUS will uphold it.
I don't think Trump having tried it matters. The policy of the SCOTUS majority is "executive power broad for things and people we like, executive power narrow for things and people we hate."
If Biden bans TikTok, and it gets before SCOTUS, I expect a lot of amicus briefs supporting him from conservative think-tanks, Republican Congresscritters, former Republican Attorneys-General, etc. If Trump doesn’t suffice as a signal to the conservative SCOTUS majority that “in this case we are all on the same side”, all those conservative amici probably will
Current SCOTUS makeup is very pro free speech. However it's really hard to say for this case since it doesn't seem like Americans are really that burdened if they have to use, say, YouTube instead of TikTok.
While it seems slightly surprising to claim that a Chinese company has the full benefit of first amendment protections, it certainly feels like the government would be on far less controversial ground if it just passed some personal data protection laws. That would make it clear to everyone what the limits are on data collection via apps, what you can and can’t ship overseas, and it would be far easier to point to a specific foreign owned app and explain exactly why it can’t be permitted to operate that way.
Instead we get this sort of national-security justification, which can be applied arbitrarily and leaves everyone uncertain about what the limits actually are.
> it seems slightly surprising to claim that a Chinese company has the full benefit of first amendment protections
The first amendment isn't a law that says "these people have freedom of speech".
Instead the law is written such that it's a restriction placed upon the legislature.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..."
It doesn't indicate whose freedom of speech cannot be abridged by congress, so (barring any overriding jurisprudence or "original intent" I'm unaware of), this therefor apparently refers to the freedom of speech of everyone... everywhere. (I feel compelled to point out that I do not have a law degree of any kind)
Later amendments draw a clearer and more deliberate distinction between who the law is targeted at.
For example, in the 14th Amendment, it states in the first clause:
"nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
It's still a law designed to restrict the power of government. However, "any person" is a clearly and deliberately defined category of people that's different from "citizens of the United States" (a phrase which was used in the same section). It's therefor clear that this protection is meant to cover non-citizens as well.
Oh, as former noncitizen I’m aware of the idea that the bill of rights is not read as only applying to citizens.
But I don’t know whether the founders would have considered the actions of foreign-government-controlled-corporations as ‘speech’, which they wanted to enjoin their government from being able to pass laws to restrict.
TikTok itself doesn't produce any content. They host the content of others. So shutting down TikTok cannot infringe on TikTok's own first amendment rights. Compare to last year when the FCC's ban on chinese telecom companies was upheld.
So the only question is does it infringe the rights of the users posting content. This is a better argument. One thing on the government's side is that content-neutral bans are a lot easier to justify as long as they serve a significant government interest and provide alternative avenues for expression. The latter seems easy to argue since TikTok has many alternatives (YouTube, Instagram, and others). And I think they could probably convince judges that national security is compelling enough.
Note that the comparison to Trump's actions in 2020 isn't really valid since that wasn't done via law. It seems like the author just threw in Trump's name because he is unpopular?
I think the author is severely downplaying the threat of the CCP using the algorithm as a weapon against the US. Obviously they're not going to show banner waving videos of communist military parades to kids.
What they will do is find relatable, young, all American creators who have ideological overlap with CCP values, then you give these creators disproportionate weight in the algo. There is enough noise on any social media platform nowadays that you just have to have control over what is promoted in order to gain traction.
Take reddit for example, where bot armies are used to shape comment sections in artificially promoted stories posted by innocent bystanders. The person pushing whatever agenda doesn't have to create or post anything. The noise of the platform is high enough that any narrative can be shaped if you have enough power to push around the algorithm.
All this being said, it should be clear why you wouldn't want a communist dictator who granted themselves a life term to control the country gunning to take Americas place on the world stage...control over what content people in America consume.
Data privacy concerns be damned, those are secondary, far secondary.
And these are exactly the reason China does not want western social media, especially since US has a history of toppling other regimes. That’s not to mention social media’s role Arab Spring. CCP probably saw that and scared shitless.
FWIw, I think these concerns are valid. But it is sad that US comes to the same conclusion as China.
I have for a while now held the opinion that social media needs to be hyper-locally locked down to be “healthy”. However, that is practically impossible to pivot to now. That said, Nextdoor model hasn’t exactly been a role model community so maybe I’m just old now.
I don't even think that is a fair assessment because it places the US in the same bin as China, but functionally the US is very different.
If Biden wanted to show you videos of daises on youtube, their really isn't any practical way of doing so. If Xi wanted to show you videos of daises on tiktok, you would open tiktok and get wall-to-wall flower videos tomorrow.
China is functionally a dictatorship. The US is not. Hence why we even get to have a debate about a foreign adversary controlling the the most popular app on the country's phones.
>But it is sad that US comes to the same conclusion as China.
Not if that conclusion is correct though. Both China and the US think the sky looks blue and the ocean is wet. Both are concerned about the power of social media to shape the narrative for millions or billions of people.
That's the same approach bill gates takes to YouTube, of course.
If that actually works for the CCP, it would be a good counterweight to the capitalist propagandists that drive how the rest to of social media is incentivised
> Finally, as we’ve been saying all along, rather than moral panics and fear mongering, let’s focus on the actual problem. Banning TikTok won’t solve the issue of any potential privacy violations. As we’ve noted over and over and over again, the supposed data that TikTok is “collecting” on its users is available from basically anywhere to basically anyone with a few bucks. Want to fix that? Pass a real privacy law.
The EU banned TikTok from official devices[1]. Anyone who thinks a "real" privacy law would alleviate the concerns people have about TikTok should explain how this "real" privacy law would differ from EU privacy law.
They are not mutually exclusive. We can do both. We can implement a privacy law with teeth and also block a primary geo-strategic competitor from harvesting personal data on a scale never before seen in human history.
Forget about free speech, this should be a trade issue.
In what other trade context would it be acceptable for one trading partner to block all access to its own market (social media) whilst still enjoying full access to everybody else's?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 78.1 ms ] threadCan someone show me the receipts!?
As the author points out, there are these vague claims by now two administrations of different political parties. Or I hear sort of hazy assertions from The Verge that TikTok is doing bad things.
What is the evidence? If we don't have the evidence, why are we still making the murky claims? If we DO have the evidence, why on earth haven't we done something about it yet?
I have to assume I'm really quite ignorant, that there is some reason for the inaction by political leaders, and so I come here genuinely from the standpoint of wanting to learn. Maybe I'm naive in either case! XD
All the threats are theoretical, about a future where TikTok is even more ubiquitous. No one can argue against such hypothetical, and would be suicidal for any politician to do so. So, here we are.
I think this debate would be much clearer if people didn't (probably without even realizing it) think they understand how China works because they understand how American works.
but I am not a lawyer and certainly not a constitutional one.
I didn't read the article, but I don't think it violates the First Amendment as it stands now if they provide a good enough basis grounded in national security. The way people want the Constitution to be, versus how it is, aren't the same thing as you pointed out.
It might. But, in this case, I think that’s less likely. If Biden tries to ban TikTok, he’ll simply be doing what Trump already tried to do. If both Trump and Biden want something, it ends up looking bipartisan-which increases the odds SCOTUS will uphold it.
Instead we get this sort of national-security justification, which can be applied arbitrarily and leaves everyone uncertain about what the limits actually are.
Or that they'd give the auditors the real system to inspect, not a dummy with the "spy" and "propaganda" plugins removed?
I agree that having some baseline limits to data sharing would be a much more principled approach here!
The first amendment isn't a law that says "these people have freedom of speech".
Instead the law is written such that it's a restriction placed upon the legislature.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..."
It doesn't indicate whose freedom of speech cannot be abridged by congress, so (barring any overriding jurisprudence or "original intent" I'm unaware of), this therefor apparently refers to the freedom of speech of everyone... everywhere. (I feel compelled to point out that I do not have a law degree of any kind)
Later amendments draw a clearer and more deliberate distinction between who the law is targeted at.
For example, in the 14th Amendment, it states in the first clause:
"nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
It's still a law designed to restrict the power of government. However, "any person" is a clearly and deliberately defined category of people that's different from "citizens of the United States" (a phrase which was used in the same section). It's therefor clear that this protection is meant to cover non-citizens as well.
But I don’t know whether the founders would have considered the actions of foreign-government-controlled-corporations as ‘speech’, which they wanted to enjoin their government from being able to pass laws to restrict.
So the only question is does it infringe the rights of the users posting content. This is a better argument. One thing on the government's side is that content-neutral bans are a lot easier to justify as long as they serve a significant government interest and provide alternative avenues for expression. The latter seems easy to argue since TikTok has many alternatives (YouTube, Instagram, and others). And I think they could probably convince judges that national security is compelling enough.
Note that the comparison to Trump's actions in 2020 isn't really valid since that wasn't done via law. It seems like the author just threw in Trump's name because he is unpopular?
What they will do is find relatable, young, all American creators who have ideological overlap with CCP values, then you give these creators disproportionate weight in the algo. There is enough noise on any social media platform nowadays that you just have to have control over what is promoted in order to gain traction.
Take reddit for example, where bot armies are used to shape comment sections in artificially promoted stories posted by innocent bystanders. The person pushing whatever agenda doesn't have to create or post anything. The noise of the platform is high enough that any narrative can be shaped if you have enough power to push around the algorithm.
All this being said, it should be clear why you wouldn't want a communist dictator who granted themselves a life term to control the country gunning to take Americas place on the world stage...control over what content people in America consume.
Data privacy concerns be damned, those are secondary, far secondary.
FWIw, I think these concerns are valid. But it is sad that US comes to the same conclusion as China.
I have for a while now held the opinion that social media needs to be hyper-locally locked down to be “healthy”. However, that is practically impossible to pivot to now. That said, Nextdoor model hasn’t exactly been a role model community so maybe I’m just old now.
If Biden wanted to show you videos of daises on youtube, their really isn't any practical way of doing so. If Xi wanted to show you videos of daises on tiktok, you would open tiktok and get wall-to-wall flower videos tomorrow.
China is functionally a dictatorship. The US is not. Hence why we even get to have a debate about a foreign adversary controlling the the most popular app on the country's phones.
Not if that conclusion is correct though. Both China and the US think the sky looks blue and the ocean is wet. Both are concerned about the power of social media to shape the narrative for millions or billions of people.
If that actually works for the CCP, it would be a good counterweight to the capitalist propagandists that drive how the rest to of social media is incentivised
The EU banned TikTok from official devices[1]. Anyone who thinks a "real" privacy law would alleviate the concerns people have about TikTok should explain how this "real" privacy law would differ from EU privacy law.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/tech/tiktok-eu-ban-intl-h...
In what other trade context would it be acceptable for one trading partner to block all access to its own market (social media) whilst still enjoying full access to everybody else's?
How is this remotely acceptable?