I agree we have an activist court in the Roberts court. How is this making an ex-post facto law, though? The suit is over a bill passed with broad bipartisan support by Congress.
> I agree we have an activist court in the Roberts court.
People who for decades subscribed to the notion that "emanations from penumbras" are a source of constitutional law don't have any room to talk about judicial activism.
It’s a bill of Attainder, i.e., a legislative act that declares a specific individual or group guilty of a crime and imposes punishment without the benefit of a judicial trial.
Is it, though? Not a lawyer, obviously. But here I seem to agree with both Bytedance’s lawyers, and the full SCOTUS. Bytedance challenged on free speech terms. There are no dissents as to the Consitutionality of the law.
Prosaically, what individual or group is being declared guilty here? The law requires TikTok to have new ownership; it doesn’t seize it, or set a price for it, which might therefore harm shareholders. Calling this attainder seems like a pretty big stretch to me. And, it seems Bytedance legal counsel didn’t think this would fly as well.
Divestment could be a punishment in some circumstances. E.g. if Congress passed a law requiring Elon Musk to divest himself of X as punishment for purportedly violating the Securities Act.
The difference here is that Tik Tok is not being accused of a crime and is not being punished for some crime. It's applying a restriction on foreign ownership not to punish Tik Tok for some past act, but because Congress is worried about the risks arising from that ownership in the future.
> However, the Court has emphasized that legislation does not violate the Bill of Attainder Clause simply because it places legal burdens on a specific individual or group.2 Rather, as discussed in more detail below, a bill of attainder must also inflict punishment.
Divestment isn't a punishment for a crime. Nobody is accusing Tik Tok of having committed a crime. Congress simply doesn't want a foreign power hostile to the U.S. to control a business that's popular in the U.S.
The interesting bits from the text[1], relative to the now flagged sibling
-----
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
-----
The way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.
I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.
This analysis seems reasonable, but I think the simpler explanation blatant corruption, since the legislation is moving judicial responsibility from from the judicial branch to the legislature and president, and a great deal of money is involved.
> I think the simpler explanation blatant corruption, since the legislation is moving judicial responsibility from from the judicial branch to the legislature and president
I mean, that's true of basically all administrative agencies.
> I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
The definition of "foreign adversary controlled application" in the bill is explicit in including either (a) this specific list of organizations, OR (b) other organization that might meet certain criteria later. I'm not sure how the existence of (b) addresses the concern that (a) amounts to a bill of attainder.
The Supreme Court has made only very narrow rulings around Bills of Attainder.
To me this bill seems problematic on that front in two directions. One is that it explicitly names a target of the ban. Secondly, it grants the president power to arbitrarily name more. Similar to how a King can declare certain Subjects be Attainded on His Whim.
But the petitioners (TikTok) did not raise this issue so the court did not have to decide on it. Instead they focused on the first amendment issue, which seems like a loser -- there is no speech present on TikTok that the law bans; any content on TikTok can be posted to red-blooded American apps like shorts or reels so the speech itself is not affected.
"Impactful" might be counting your chickens a little too early. Let's see if it has any impact. The next POTUS might just ignore it, or some other shenanigans might be used to work around whatever the imagined impact was.
Just look at the decision lists on Oyez or Scotusblog? Big decisions are more likely to be split than small ones but SCOTUS hears many many cases that get almost no media attention, most of which are decided unanimously.
The kids flocking to another Chinese app just to avoid using Reels, Shorts, or whatever abomination is on X continues to be so funny to me. Looks like a long game of whack a mole starting.
Am I missing something obvious, or is that only available in one language? How do American teenagers use that?
Don't get me wrong, I consumed American media and played American video games before I understood English, so clicking around eventually led you down some path.
But isn't most of that content meant to be consumed by people who understand the language said content is made with?
Mostly just lots of translation. Lots of American and Chinese users are putting translations directly into posts and comments to make it easier for others.
The funny this is American teens may start learning Mandarin as a result of this ill-advised ban, which is exactly what the US government doesn't want!
If this motivates any significant portion of the populace to learn one of the hardest languages to learn (In the West), I'd see that as a justification alone.
They're detecting Americans now somehow and setting the language to English by default; I didn't have to change the language. The translation looks pretty rushed but it's enough to navigate the app. The community guidelines are, notably, still only in Mandarin.
The posts are largely subtitled in both Chinese and English regardless of the spoken language. Comments are often in both languages, but if not you can click Translate.
Any parent (and even us non-parents who've spent a lot of time around kids) know that the best way to get teenagers to stop doing something, is to start doing it yourself. If you forbid them to do something, it's basically inviting them to try their hardest to do it anyways.
12-year-olds probably aren't getting the same 10-minute videos of auto insurance adjusters taking exceptional calls that I am. But they might if they're precocious.
I watch at least 2-3 10 minute videos on TikTok daily, and a large number of 5+ minute videos! There's an amazing amount of good content, and once the algorithm hones in on what you care about it gets surfaced for you.
Can't say I have insurance adjusters on my FYP, but I think that speaks to the power of the algorithm's targeting far more than it does the lack of content.
PG is full of shit. "Woke" originated within the black activist community and culturally goes back as far as the 1930s. It got adopted and became mainstream within the white liberal progressive community through the popularity of black music artists and social media in the late 20th century. It has absolutely nothing to do with Mao's Red Book or communism.
This is how I got mine to stop saying slay, preppy and sigma. The look of horror and cringe on their face when I say crap like "skibidi ohio rizz" in front of them and their friends, is a chef's kiss.
This is exactly why I’ve started slinging gen alpha lingo at our daughters: even doing it jokingly makes them cringe enough to stop using it themselves.
Oh, wasn't meant at any dig in terms of quality, I don't believe in that kind of characterization. Besides, ostensibly, Chinese developers have been much more successful in this space and seem to deliver better products. I just wouldn't know myself as I stay off of shortform video platforms.
The irony of Americans flocking to a CCP-approved app whose Chinese name is translated to "little red book" is just a bit too on-the-nose. For those who don't know, Little Red Book is also the literature spread during the Cultural Revolution in China that was a collection of quotes and sayings by Chairman Mao.
There's gotta be a joke in there about the communists selling the capitalists the rope the capitalists eventually hang themselves with. But, I digress.
The meme I'm seeing everywhere is that with so many Americans joining RedNote, Americans are discovering how much Chinese people are paying for healthcare, food or property, and Chinese people are discovering things like 40 hour work weeks and actually having a holiday from time to time - so now the question is whether US or China bans it first.
The 666 workweek(6 days a week 6 am till 6pm) is definitely real in some companies and it's a big problem with work culture especially in tech. But in general I'm sure they do holidays.
China also has 7 main federally recognized holidays. Although, one interesting thing they do is "weekend shifting" where they move the official work days near, e.g. the Spring Festival so that people get a full week of holiday (at the cost of a longer workweek or a one-day weekend right before/after it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_China#Weeke...
Under a million kids moving over to RedNote for a week or 2 means nothing. There is no whack a mole. Tiktok algo is the sauce, nothing else has the sauce. People enjoyed the sauce.
"the sauce" is for the audience to figure out. The sauce was disgusting to me, but that didn't matter to those 100m consumers.
And yes, this begs the question of "when does something become a matter of national security". 10 million? A million moving over before the day of reckoning isn't a small thing.
the sauce = tiktok's algorithm. The audience doesn't figure that out, the company delivering the videos to you does. So far, no one else seems to have even come close. GenZ are proactively against Zuck, so that's even a bigger hole for Reels to overcome. Rednote doesn't have the algo people want and its interface isn't in English. It cost zilch for those kids to make a RedNote account. They are literally making it a meme. They wont be there in 2 months when no one else is there, and the joke is over. RedNote will have even more heavy handed moderation than TikTok as it is currently sharing its userbase with Chinese citizens. RedNote is not an answer to any of the underlying wants or desires of the Tiktok community except for a extreme minority of the TikTok userbase who are rallying against the US govt/Meta. Personally, I think the ban is within the power of the US government to do but do recognize the very real concerns and view of those who think the government shouldn't have done this. The incoming administration is free to seek to undo this if they want, but it can and should take an act of legislation to undo.
Reels and YT Shorts are definitely worse, but I would attribute that to not having the same content to even show and not having the same amount of data because of a much smaller audience than to having an inferior recommendation system.
Even if that could occur, they don't have time to hire, design and implement it before their window of capturing the wave is over. RedNote is in a right place wrong time situation that would be in a worse position that Tiktok was in for scrutiny since we already had the house the data here legal battle with Bytedance.
It isn't really whack-a-mole though, because despite the media coverage there is no "TikTok ban bill." Instead it's a "Hostile nation can't own majority stakes in media companies in the US" bill, and this SCOTUS ruling sets the precedent that can be enforced on as many entities as required.
On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.
So how big does Rednote need to be to "majority stakes in media companies in the US"? I don't like this ruling at all, but it feels very American to see another looming threat and say "well, I'll just wait until it gets too big to deal with it".
It qualifies already, but I really doubt it's going to take off for many reasons. It isn't TikTok, the CCP has a much heavier hand there (ask the kids who ran into a 48 hour review period for their posts), and frankly I don't think the CCP is going to appreciate a bunch of mostly young, leftist teens sharing their ideas with Chinese people. The reaction to "Here's how you can organize a union/3D print a gun" has been hilariously predictable.
The Red Note nonsense is just a meme, somewhat fittingly. First, because the only place you see coverage of all the "kids flocking" is... on TikTok itself. It's always a red (heh) flag when your source for big important events comes only from the affected parties.
But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.
Kids are born into a world where the last generation is already essentially locked into lifetime servitude, the world is burning, and the "adults in the room" are a circus. How could they not indulge in alternatives? What is there to look forward to, identify with, or love about this place?
Culture thrives when the people are able to live meaningful lives.
> Although Trump could choose to not enforce the law
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
> Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
I agree. And the bribery already started when the Trump campaign found itself doing very well on engagement in TikTok. The CCP had already started the bribery before the election in a bid to maintain influence over the US while halting American influence in China.
The Biden administration I believe said they won't enforce the law starting Sunday, leaving it to the incoming administration to enforce. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok, so I expect he'll do it without forcing a sale.
The president is in charge of executing the law. It’s in our system of checks and balances. I’m choosing to speak at an extremely general level, of course, but that is the answer to your question.
Specifically, I think it's "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Art. II, §3).
Does that mean "If foreign companies don't like our laws, they can pay to have them adjusted"? Seems not very faithful, but I hardly understand that word anymore it feels like.
I mean, SCOTUS also decided nothing a sitting President does in their official capacity while in office can be considered a crime even if it breaks the law so yeah.
The logic behind such a ruling is nonsensical. Imagine if a president, in his/her official capacity, started murdering political rivals. In other countries, that's considered a dictatorship and should be stopped. But in America, that's completely legal according to SCOTUS. In fact, that was one of the questions asked by the justices!
Apparently, committing crimes with absolute immunity is a necessary part of the presidential office. Without such protections, they'd be afraid to do things like extrajudicial drone strikes (Obama) and internment camps (FDR). Oh, wait.
I hate to "Poe's Law" this tangent, but most people forget that Hitler's rise to power was also completely legal. Just change the constitution and get the judiciary to side with you, and you can do anything. It's terrifying.
The US has 3 different branches. The president is the head of one of the branches called the executive branch, which is the branch that enforces the law. Every president, at least in modern times, selectively chooses when they enforce laws and how severely they enforce the law. The DOJ, department of justice, is part of the executive branch and is involved with such matters.
The selective enforcement of laws is a hot button issue and both sides accuse the other of doing it. (Both sides do it all the time).
As far as I know, every country has similar issues. I constantly see articles where people are allegedly being prosecuted because they are on the opposite side of the government leadership while also seeing articles claiming they let their own side off.
Veering off-topic but I don't understand how there isn't wide-spread protests/riots right now in the US. Is the working/middle class just accepting all of this, even when it's apparent the government is being sold for quick cash?
A couple of Trump forums focus on distractions like the California fires and delete comments about working class rights. The same forums that were full of workers' rights just until before the election.
Breitbart has nothing on immigration and displacement of US workers. It celebrates the (alleged, Trump claims a lot) phone call between Trump and Xi.
So unless the MAGA crowd goes to the capitol to protest against Trump this time, you won't hear anything anywhere.
This is largely a non-starter, though? He can't choose to have it not be a law, he could choose to selectively enforce it. Where selective enforcement is assumed to be no enforcement from your post. But he could, as easily, use it to punish any company he doesn't like that is somehow in breach of it.
And this ultimately puts it in a place where you have to assume that it will be enforced against you. Right?
Where was this line of thinking when it was Obama ordering the DEA to not enforce marijuana laws? Where is this line of thinking when it's a city that chooses not to enforce dog breed restrictions?
The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.
While I find it entirely plausible that Trump's character is such that he might accept bribes I am aware of no credible evidence that he has ever done so.
From what I've heard, not enforcing the ban doesn't really work. Apple/Google would be liable if the law does get enforced. So unless they've gone completely insane and want to give Trump a threat to wield over them for his whole term, they'll surely act as if it's being enforced. The term on the law is 5 years too, so even if they do have perfect trust in Trump never changing his mind, they have to worry about the next President deciding to enforce it too.
FWIW, this has driven many users to RedNote, which is even more Chinese in every way, regardless of whether it's even the same kind of platform. I doubt it would ever be anywhere near the same numbers as TikTok (assuming ByteDance didn't sell off) but it does illustrate the trouble with this i.e. cat-and-mouse game.
I agree. I'm not sure if I think all of this is good or not. Even if you, a gov't, didn't have an interest in managing your citizens vis-a-vis some platform, it doesn't mean other govt's don't have that interest, so maybe there's some validity to it in that case. But all of that raises even more questions, like "so what?" and "to what end?"
This is very misleading "news" and it doesn't illustrate anything, a bunch of users installed rednote out of protest, but this is a fully chinese app with 100% chinese content and 99% of users will move to youtube, instagram, etc
According to CNN, roughly 700,000 people have installed Rednote—though that figure only represents those who have tested the app and doesn’t necessarily reflect sustained usage. By comparison, TikTok is said to have around 110 million users in the United States, meaning 700,000 installs amount to less than 1% of TikTok’s user base.
Meanwhile, YouTube’s user numbers in the U.S. are estimated at 240 million, but it’s unlikely to gain many new downloads since almost everyone already has the app.
In my view, it’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
> 700,000 installs amount to less than 1% of TikTok’s user base.
700k in how much time? RN tops the (Play Store) charts here (EU/Croatia) as well, and anecdotally there's a lot of word of mouth growth. Even though TikTok will not get banned over here.
> It’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
Possibly, but it does have a foot in the door. It doesn't look like they were ready for western audience so remains to be seen if they can seize on the opportunity.
I am pulling these numbers out of my a* but comparing to the situation in Twitter. People can be enthusiastic to move but if a significant portion doesn't do it in a certain window of time, they'll just drop out of it.
Let's say this portion is around 60% of Tiktok users. So something like 60-70million and window span is 10 days. They need to sustain 6-7 million new US users per day in order to make a successful transition.
Considering that RedNote doesn't allow LGBTQ+ content or "too much skin" to be shown (women-only policy BTW) I don't think it'll end up being very popular with today's TikTok crowd.
A non-trivial number of videos I've seen this week mention also being able to find the creator of said video on Rednote. It is also the number 1 downloaded app in the US iOS store this week. The news may be a logical extreme, but it's not fake.
Having a non-trivial number of videos is not the same as being the replacement platform. Youtube is also being spammend with tiktok users uploading old content. The idea that after the dust settles the majority of 110 million tiktok users will end up using a tightly censored chinese social media platform rather than moving to obvious alternatives such as instagram and youtube seems very very unlikely.
Rednote has been shown as the top free app (per Apple’s own App Store in my device at least) for going on a week, so the magnitude may be larger than you imply.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
I don't think that's going to happen. The party official seems to be positive about the event overall based on their press release recently. IMO it's going to the opposite direction, where they try to get more foreign users on the platform and have them stay there. If I were a CCP official, I would love to have more soft power by having everyone on a Chinese platform.
I explicitly stated in a different comment that Rednote will not replace TikTok. I don’t think anyone seriously believes that. It’s subject to the same ban after all.
The interesting aspect here is rather the magnitude of dissatisfaction that a large percentage of users feel towards the other mainstream US social content platforms.
I feel like the protest move to RedNote will be short lived. The censorship there is draconian - if you say even the slightest thing that offends the CCP on red note, you get banned. See this discussion on the subreddit for TikTok (https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i2wll3/how_to_not_...).
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
> the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true)
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.
I don’t know the details of this app’s corporate structure, but if it’s developed here and user data stays here it would not qualify under the act. Based on the context of your and other comments I assumed it was also a foreign-controlled app
The REDnot is not a "foreign-controlled" app, it's a foreign app, and it does not target the US market. The US citizens chose to use a non-US app. How would US enforce a ban? Send marines to Shanghai and capture CEOs?
Oh I misread your comment (read /inside/ rather than /outside/ for some reason), but obviously the same way they’re going to ban tiktok? Make it illegal for the app stores to host.
REDnote is explicitly "小红书国际版", or "Little Red Book International Version" and is in English in US app stores. It's definitely targeting non-Chinese users.
CCP: let's create 200 apps where each app has just less than 1 million active; and then cross-content across the apps so you are sort of browsing a single site. Maybe China will finally bring federated social media.
From the oral arguments it was immediately obvious that Alito and Thomas had already decided their opinion --- as had the other judges, frankly. They were very skeptical of the ByteDance/petitioner's argument. The Act at issue was written in a very specific way to neuter a lot of their points. Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the US Government, is also an extremely good SC lawyer in oral arguments. A Per Curiam decision is not surprising at all, most people who follow the court were expecting it.
I don't think your freedom of speech is being curtailed by not being able to watch funny videos or propaganda on an app. TikTok also isn't an American company. Foreign companies have always been subject to U.S. regulations and laws that differ from the rights of American-owned businesses, as it should be and will continue to be.
But don't worry either way. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok and he does really well on the platform so it'll be saved.
Friend. I do not worry. I dislike all social media and would not shed one tear if all those were dismantled.
What I shed a tear for is slow decline of US and its founding principles, because George Carlin clearly was right. Even if you barely pay attention, the list your your temporary privileges is slowly getting shorter.
edit: Even the fact that I have to explain it at such a basic level is tremendously sad.
I understand your discussion points, I just disagree with them. If we were talking about banning all social media, I think you'd be able to make a stronger 1st Amendment case.
Instead, we've passed a law through Congress to restrict a foreign business from operating in the United States. We do this all the time, and have from the start of our history. Such actions were supported by the founders and are legally consistent. Just because TikTok allows people to share memes better doesn't make it a free speech platform. It's just some company and we can choose to allow it to operate here or not as a society.
<< It's just some company and we can choose to allow it to operate here or not as a society.
That is some mighty slippery slope you are on friend. You sure you are ok with this one company being singled out and exceptions slowly applied to the first amendment? Make no mistake. This, at best, is just a temporary pitstop, because, as time progresses, more and more will chosen to be 'disfavored'/'disallowed' ( I have no way of knowing what euphemism will be used to describe it ) to operate in society. Should be fun.
<< If we were talking about banning all social media, I think you'd be able to make a stronger 1st Amendment case.
We are talking about TikTok, but I am arguing that singling one company out effectively undermines 1st amendment. You may be right about strengthtening the case. I am not able to properly judge that.
<< Instead, we've passed a law through Congress to restrict a foreign business from operating in the United States.
Sure, but the restriction does not seem to apply to other market contestants. Meta and MS do the same things ( but for US ) and yet do not seem to be penalized.
<< Just because TikTok allows people to share memes better doesn't make it a free speech platform.
Just because you consider it a useless meme, does not make it not speech. There is a reason why the saying goes 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.
TikTok is a foreign company that was given permission to operate in the United States.
We give and take permission from foreign companies to operate here all the time and it's not a conflict with our Constitution.
Let's take American sanctions, for example.
Are you going to argue that Russia's Gazprom's right to free speech is stifled too? Or do they just have to create a Gazprom social media app so they can become a free speech platform and now "sorry 1st Amendment can't do anything"? Can Iran open up an office in San Francisco and create an app and share a few videos and then share tips for making bombs and encourage Americans to not take vaccines and not send their kids to school and to eat laundry detergent pods?
This doesn't justify one way or the other any other tech company's behavior, but if they are an American company owned by Americans the rules always have been and always will be different (as they should be).
> Make no mistake. This, at best, is just a temporary pitstop, because, as time progresses, more and more will chosen to be 'disfavored'/'disallowed' ( I have no way of knowing what euphemism will be used to describe it ) to operate in society. Should be fun.
We can just ban any foreign owned social media company from operating in the United States. But I don't think you are wrong. Americans (and people around the globe) are extremely addicted to social media and whether that's Meta or TikTok they'll find a way to feed that addiction even as it damages their mind. I think it would be good to ban all social media across the globe. We'd all be more free and better off for it.
I am in a pickle, because I do not think I can comment on those hypotheticals without going down a deep rabbit hole. Fwiw, sanctions is not a bad counter-argument regardless of my biased view of those.
<< Are you going to argue that Russia's Gazprom's right to free speech is stifled too?
Hardly an issue given that they do not operate in space that publishes American's thoughts.
<< Or do they just have to create a Gazprom social media app so they can become a free speech platform and now "sorry 1st Amendment can't do anything"? Can Iran open up an office in San Francisco and create an app and share a few videos and then share tips for making bombs and encourage Americans to not take vaccines and not send their kids to school and to eat laundry detergent pods?
Now those are good questions, but how are those videos that different than what can be found on 4chan daily? Apart from everything else, it makes source easier to identify..
<< This doesn't justify one way or the other any other tech company's behavior, but if they are an American company owned by Americans the rules always have been and always will be different (as they should be).
Hard disagree, but I accept that this is where we both can be reasonably at odds. I accept there are pragmatic benefits to your approach.
<< We can just ban any foreign owned social media company from operating in the United States.
I mean yes, clearly based on the fact that TikTok was just banned.
<< Americans (and people around the globe) are extremely addicted to social media and whether that's Meta or TikTok they'll find a way to feed that addiction even as it damages their mind.
I think you are right about the addiction, but I am not sure if you are right about the action taken as a result of that addiction.
<< I think it would be good to ban all social media across the globe. We'd all be more free and better off for it.
Here we are aligned.
***********
Thank you for this exchange. It is why I come to HN. I have a long day ahead so I might not be able to respond more timely from this point forward today.
Regardless of one’s view on the outcome, this case is a reminder that textualism as a legal philosophy stands on shaky ground. This case is decided not on some strict analysis of the words written by a legislator, but on the court’s subjective view that there is a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
Well gosh, that sentence makes it seems like Congress could do anything!
However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.
>that sentence makes it seems like Congress could do anything!
Yeah, it's the perhaps most powerful clause in the constitution. A large number of laws are formed like "[actual law ...] in commerce." That is the hook needed for a lot of laws to be constitutional. Technically those laws only apply to interstate or international commerce.
There are even supreme court cases discussing this:
>Congress uses different modifiers to the word “commerce” in the design and enactment of its statutes. The phrase “affecting commerce” indicates Congress’ intent to regulate to the outer limits of its authority under the Commerce Clause. [...] Considering the usual meaning of the word “involving,” and the pro-arbitration purposes of the FAA, Allied-Bruce held the “word ‘involving,’ like ‘affecting,’ signals an intent to exercise Congress’ commerce power to the full.” Ibid. Unlike those phrases, however, the general words “in commerce” and the specific phrase “engaged in commerce” are understood to have a more limited reach. In Allied-Bruce itself the Court said the words “in commerce” are “oftenfound words of art” [...] The Court’s reluctance to accept contentions that Congress used the words “in commerce” or “engaged in commerce” to regulate to the full extent of its commerce power rests on sound foundation, as it affords objective and consistent significance to the meaning of the words Congress uses when it defines the reach of a statute.[0]
The original sin was Wickard, which found a farmer “growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm” was subject to interstate commerce “reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally, is thus interstate, and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause” [1]. The court even noted that the farmer’s “relatively small amount of production of more wheat than he was allotted would not affect interstate commerce itself,” ruling that “the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers” acting as he did would.
This seems true… many many thousands of farmers combined consuming their own self grown wheat, would produce noticeable effects on interstate commerce. Specifically wheat markets, futures, etc…
I think the meaning of the commerce clause is pretty explicit in the constitution. The existence of unreasonable interpretations of the commerce clause doesn't change that the commerce clause on it's own, just with a simple reading of it, isn't powerful. Also worth noting that at least one textualist, Justice Thomas, dissented in that case, exactly because of textualism.
Honestly, it seems completely irrelevant that a simple reading of the commerce clause isn't that powerful. What matters is how things are applied, and what precedents have been established. As applied the commerce clause is immensly powerful. As layman we can whinge about how words have been twisted, but in terms of things i can personally influence it means exactly nothing.
Whoops, "doesn't change " should be "doesn't mean." I think the simple reading actually is pretty powerful. It just says "[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;" There aren't many qualifiers there except notably intrastate commerce.
> Yeah, it's the perhaps most powerful clause in the constitution
It's worth noting that many conservative lawyers and activists have been calling for a more limited interpretation of interstate commerce, as a way of shifting power away from Congress to individual states.
This is about as much foreign commerce as it is me buying a Xiaomi phone.
I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.
> Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.
Further more, "Corporations are people" implying corporations have rights isn't related to corporate personhood and is based on a (often deliberate by opposing politicians) misinterpretation of the phrase, as spoken by Mitt Romney.
What Romney was saying and what is true when he said "Corporations are people" is confusing because people interpret it as "Corporations are persons" which is not what he, or the case law he was referring to implied. The singular of the phrase is much more clear, a corporation is people.
The whole case was about a group of people pooling their funds to make a movie about Hilary Clinton being bad and the court found that the people still had free speech rights when acting through a corporation to pool their funds and so political donation limits didn't apply as long as no political campaign was involved. Hence, Super PACs having to say that the campaigns their supporting aren't involved with the campaigns.
It's actually an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation and the decision is equally so.
Whether Congress has jurisdiction here is not at issue. The court is deciding a different question, which is whether the ban would violate the first amendment. We look at their ruling:
>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.
What does this have to do with the First Amendment? How would this be different from an antitrust ruling that requires Alphabet to divest Youtube, but Alphabet decides to shut down Youtube instead?
The Supreme Court can only rule on cases brought to it. And in those cases, they are ruling on specific points of law which one party believes that a lower court misapplied. In this case, the parties asked the Court specifically to review whether a TikTok forced divestiture (not a ban, a forced sale) violated the First Amendment.
> The Supreme Court can only rule on cases brought to it.
That might be technically true, but if (1) you're the lawyer representing a party in an important case, (2) you've already appealed that case up to the highest appelate court and lost, and (3) you think there's any chance that the Supreme Court might change the ruling in your favor, then wouldn't it basically be professional malpractice to not petition for certiorari? Of course, they only accept a tiny percentage of the petitions they receive.
>What does this have to do with the First Amendment?
Because obviously changing the owner-editor of a media outlet has everything to do with their editorial policy. The SCOTUS just said that censorship is ok (and forcing the change of the editor is censorship, there is no doubt about it), as long as it's against another state's editorial preferences potentially having a significant audience in the country.
The government doesn't care about the editorial policy so long as if it's not managed by a foreign adversary or proxies of a foreign adversary, which obviously fall out of scope of the First Amendment. This is consistent with the wholly uncontroversial indictments of the owners of Tenet Media who allegedly conspired with Russia. Meanwhile, the commentators on the channel, such as Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, claimed to have had full editorial control over their content that just so happened to align exactly with Russian propaganda, yet they were free to go.
>which obviously fall out of scope of the First Amendment.
It obviously doesn't. That would mean the US Government can ban all foreign press, just by designating countries as "foreign adversaries". And "foreign adversaries" is a euphemism for "countries that don't submit". The SCOTUS just invented another exception to the absolutist interpretation.
>wholly uncontroversial indictments of the owners of Tenet Media
>were charged with failing to register as a foreign agent
This entire narrative together with the banning of Tiktok is wholly hypocritical, given the American media, tech, and NGO's influence/dominance around the world.
The moment someone achieved what the American entities have been doing around the world, the non-stop wailing of "foreign adversaries this, foreign adversaries that" started.
Meanwhile in Georgia, a country bordering Russia, the law requiring foreign-financed NGOs to register was declared to "stigmatize organizations that serve the citizens of Georgia" with accompanying travel bans for the authoritarian evil doers who passed said law by the US state department.
>Petitioners argue that such a ban will burden various First Amendment activities, including content moderation, content generation, access to a distinct medium for expression, association with another speaker or preferred editor, and receipt of information and ideas.
Sotomayor expands on this in her concurrence:
>TikTok engages in expressive activity by “compiling and curating” material on its platform. Laws that “impose a disproportionate burden” upon those engaged in expressive activity are subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment. The challenged Act plainly imposes such a burden: It bars any entity from distributing TikTok’s speech in the United States, unless TikTok undergoes a qualified divestiture. The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.”
It's opinion regardless of the specific legal philosophy. Each philosophy makes decisions about what kinds of information, sources, context, etc are considered to form the "correct" interpretation. Those decisions are opinions.
That’s actually my point. I don’t think strict textualism really has anything to do with any case. As soon as you say it’s the rule of law that drives every case, you find yourself somehow interpreting an awful lot.
It's not really speculation, though. Certain aspects of the intelligence relationships between the US and China are highly asymmetrical already.
For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.
China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.
Yeah it’s funny MAGA still wants to encourage more H1b from China because you know apparently Americans are smart enough and are lazy. (Thanks for your vote though we will get rid of trans migrants!)
> Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.
Congress isn't banning TikTok either. The law says US businesses can't work with TikTok. TokTok is choosing to shut down to try and force the issue politically. TikTok can choose stay running, the app will still be on your phone, no IP addresses are being blocked. The laws impact comes from choking off revenue and marketing (access to app stores).
"We're not banning your business, we're just cutting the water and power and changing the locks oh and also we burned down the entire building and salted the earth so nothing will ever grow again."
You're right, though it's effectively a ban on the iPhone because the only way to get apps is through the Apple Store; but yes, it's not like the app itself will stop working, or there will be some IP block, by order of Congress.
Could TikTok work through a browser? I can get to Facebook and YouTube through my iPhone Safari browser. Indeed I buy Kindle ebooks through the iPhone Safari because the Kindle and Amazon apps won't let me make purchases.
You misapprehend what textualism is. It does not say that every legal case can be decided by interpreting written law. It is merely a philosophy of how to interpret written law when its meaning is what's at issue. What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws. It would hardly merit a label, if it wasn't for a long history in the 20th century of jurists departing from written law in making decisions. In this case, there is no dispute about what the written law means. It's about applying a pre-existing legal concept, the freedom of speech, to particular facts.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.
> Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
> Another example that highlights the distinction...
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
Do you understand that the word "unreasonable" would be a subjective analysis and that this would be the textualist recommendation? The text itself calls for a subjective analysis. And therefore doing so would be the textualist position.
Not to wave anybody off an interesting rabbit hole, but is that the germane difference here? My understanding: common law features a relatively smaller "source of truth" of written law, and relatively more expansive and variably-binding jurisprudence, where judge decisions set precedent and shape the law. Civil law writes almost everything down ahead of time.
I guess civil law gives you less room to explore ideas like "living" statutes and laws that gain and change meaning over time; if there was such a change, you'd write it down?
Regardless: whether you're a textualist or realist, in the US you're still operating in a common law system.
It's the difference OP is referring to. You can be the judge of if it's relevant in the US to talk about civil law as the "norm" given that our legal system is not, in fact, based on civil law. I'm just providing a link to the concepts OP was referencing.
I don't think it is, because textualism is just one school (the other current school is legal realism) in the US system, which is common law. But I'm not sniping you, I'm just pursuing a nerdy angle here.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. I was specifically referring to this line by OP:
> What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws.
They were making a direct comparison between "textualism" and civil law, but didn't include the terms. I found the comparison interesting and thought I'd make it easier for anyone else who was confused by OP's comparison.
I realize on re-reading that this comparison is much less prominent than I thought it was in OP's comment, so it makes sense that my links would seem out of place. An explicit quote of that sentence would have helped.
This was a unanimous decision. The only points where Sotomayor and Gorusch disagreed with the majority decision was whether TikTok's operation qualified under strict scrutiny for first amendment considerations, but both agreed that even under strict scrutiny, the law would have survived the challenge.
Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publication s were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Individuals can bring Pravda into the USA that is protected speech. But Congress could ban Pravda from doing business in the US same as it can ban or sanction any other foreign business.
People have rights to speak within reason. Governments don't. The Chinese government shaping content is not protected. The law notably does not ban individual content.
RT is required to register as a foreign agent in the US and is required to disclose information regarding its activities in the country or be subject to civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance. So I would not say it's able to operate without restriction.
The justices seem to have argued that eliminating a platform for speech does not inhibit your ability to voice that speech on another platform, so is not a violation of the first amendment. I think this is an important outcome and really goes against what many so called "free speech absolutists" would argue.
Because the law bans the operation of software by a foreign adversary. It does not ban speech.
Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.
It seems like everyone missed the analogy of TikTok being like a Soviet newspaper, but the better analogy was like Tiktok being a tracking device, which transmitted your exact location, along with a microphone and video camera provided by the Soviet. The hardware may be Apple (made in China, designed in California), but the software extends the hardware usage to the software provider. I'm not sure there was any era of US history which the law would have permitted that.
they found some of the arguments compelling and acknowledged that the law may burden free speech. But they also found that the law is not about speech, it's about corporate ownership. In these cases the court will often (not always) defer to congress / the state.
> a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.
Let's not forget that the US government has forced US companies to secretly hand over user data for "national security" purposes. Anyone who denies that China does similar things either doesn't know how the world works or is consciously denying reality.
But China is a bit different in that they don't simply have the authority to request data, they have the authority to direct management of the company.
I can make guesses about a lot of things, but I know for a fact that what Chinese law requires is materially different than what US law requires.
Regardless, "someone associated with the government got a job at your company" is entirely different in consequence than "the government requires you to have government interests on your board"
Rather I think this a good example of how people go through the steps of delegimitizing institutions if it dosen't agree with their opinion. If the Supreme Court's opinion is "shaky" then I guess the Pro-TikTokers would teetering on pole in the middle on the ocean.
I'd use the term 'originalism' rather 'textualism', but you have a point. For 1st amendment cases, the court hasn't (yet) tried to use their new fangled originalist methodologies. In fact justice Gorsuch wrote separately in the Tiktok case to dig on the levels of scrutiny.
I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.
For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.
Since I'm a reasonably well-known textualist, I'll bite:
First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.
TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.
Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.
Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.
Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.
Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.
Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Good point. Social media accounts should only be available to people who live in the country where the company is based. Then there's no need to ban Facebook and X elsewhere.
Right, Congress was shown some pretty convincing evidence that execs in China pull the strings, and those execs are vulnerable to Chinese government interference.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
They released a Marty Rimm-level report citing that pro-Palestinian was mentioned more than pro-Israeli content in ratios that differed from Meta products. This was the 'smoking gun' of manipulation when it's more of a sign Meta was the one doing the manipulation.
The opinion today has almost nothing to do with how content is controlled on the platform; the court is very clear that they'd have upheld the statute based purely on the data collection issue.
I don't know what Congress has said but there absolutely is evidence that TikTok has been used to spy on users for political reasons. A US based engineer claims that he saw evidence that Hong Kong protestors were spied on in 2018 at the behest of a special committee representing the CCP's interests within ByteDance. This is not surprising, most major corporations within China maintain a special committee representing the government's interests to company executives
Do law enforcement portals provide current location information? There's an extended history of the TikTok being used to spy on the location of user devices
Okay, that's because Grindr users choose to publicly share their current location; that's the point of the app. Governments having an API that lets them access data that users publicly share seems substantively different from governments having access to private information, obtaining that information by subverting internal controls at TikTok and ByteDance intended to keep it private. I think anyone not arguing for arguments sake would acknowledge that
Most apps coerce their users into sharing location information. That's why they released apps and did not just use progressive web apps in the first place.
But, this is done under the guise of commercial interests, usually advertising, so it's okay?
You are assuming a lot about supposed evidence nobody has said anything specific about. One shouldn't also assume people in Congress know how to evaluate any evidence. Nor justices, based on the questions they asked.
As a matter of political science and public choice theory, the legislature is the branch of government most trusted to collect information and make these kinds of deliberations.
You might buy that, but I don't. Unless they can actually put forward publicly compelling evidence of a national security risk, this can only be seen as a handout to Facebook by the government. This saga just gives more evidence that the US government exists primarily to serve the interests of US's oligarch class. Aside for those oligarchs, it does nothing to serve US citizens' interests.
Would you call Marjorie Taylor Greene a qualified and trusted investigator for the american people? I sure wouldn’t. Talking about what the legislature is supposed to be is irrelevant. What the legislature actually is is relevant.
Congress members speak of space lasers and weather control... I'm not sure they're competent as a whole. Actually, it reminds me of the Russian guy that always spouts nonsense about nuking UK into oblivion, and that theory that he's just kept around to make the real evil people look sane.
I’m sure he’s bending at the knee right now because he feels very secure and just had a change of heart about everything precisely one month after the election.
Is he bending the knee, or dropping the mask? The billionaire+ class rightly sees this as their big opportunity to seize power for the next several generations, removing worker and consumer protections and enshrining themselves as essential parts of the government.
No, X doesn't have a corporate governance structure that requires Chinese government control, because it is a US company.
Companies in China (and especially those of prominence) have formal structures and regulations that require them to cooperate with the government, and sometimes require the companies to allow the government to intervene in operations if necessary.
It is not possible for a CCP official to show up to a board meeting at X and direct the company to take some action, because that isn't how US corporations work.
A CCP official could show up at a Tesla board meeting and announce they're going to seize Gigafactory Shanghai unless Musk takes down some content on X. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
Tesla is quite notable as the only foreign automaker which China has allowed to operate independently in China. All of the rest of them were forced to joint venture with 51%+ control being handed over to a Chinese domestic company. So, really it's pretty surprising that they haven't done that even before Musk owned X.
But regardless, there is a huge difference between a request and actually having managerial authority -- the most obvious being that someone with managerial authority can simply do whatever they want without trying to compel someone else. Also, X, being subject to US law, must comply with that no matter what consequences Musk is threatened with. So, any threats may have limits in what they can practically accomplish.
That's the way I like it for my children. Pardon the demagogue. The US, being the awful mess it is is still 100x better IMHO than the chinese government. It's the lesser evil kind of thing and honestly the reason I believe that democracy is 100% THE way to go. Things can only get US level nefarious with democracy. Far from perfect but much less evil.
The only problem with democracy is that it's so fragile and susceptible to bad non-democrat actors intervention, which is more of an awareness problem.
That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
I assure you, if you read the opinion, that is indeed it, and the objection you raise about other instances of data collection not being targeted is addressed directly.
> That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia.
I'm not sure they do that anymore, not in the current geopolitical climate and not with the DC ghouls having taken over the most sensitive parts of Meta the company (there were many posts on this web-forum about former CIA people and not only working at the highest levels inside of Meta).
This is arguing technical definitions. As of this week, foreign intelligence agencies transfers money that eventually ends up at Facebook, and they get the data in return.
They can claim this is not a sale if they want, but it’s still a sale. Drug dealers make similar arguments about similar shell games where you hand a random dude some cash, then later some other random dude drops a bag on the ground and you pick it up.
Since Facebook was first caught doing this during the Obama administration, it’s hard to argue they are not intentionally selling the data at this point.
Facebook's owners & their peers have a massive amount of control over public policy, so no, I don't think the US government can tell them to stop doing it.
Yet the government convinced both Facebook and Twitter to suppress both the Hunter laptop and information about the Covid vaccines that we all know is true now - that it doesn’t prevent the spread of Covid and that immunity wears off.
I’m not anti-vax. I’ve been shot up with Covid vaccines more often than I can count and I was early in line for the J and J one shot and I took an mRNA booster before it was recommended by the US once I started reading it was recommended by other country’s health departments.
But where we are now is totally the fault of Biden and the Democratic establishment.
No argument here. Most Democrats, including Biden, and all Republicans serve at the whims of Facebook's owners and their peers. Hence the enormous handout to Facebook in this decision.
I think you would be hard pressed to come up with any evidence for your assertion. First of all the UK is not a foreign adversary (quite the opposite). Secondly Facebook didn't sell data in that case, it was collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook's platform APIs (as described in your own link). In general Facebook doesn't sell data, their entire business model is based on having exclusive access to data from its platforms.
This whole Cambridge Analytica thing is such a nothing burger - I have yet to be given a concise reason how it was anything other than targeted advertising. Something that happens day-in, day-out a billion times over on all our "western" platforms in the form of ads. And no, the fact that this data wasn't "consented to" doesn't mean anything other than being a technicality. If anything, I'd chalk the whole thing up to anti-Trump hysteria that happened around that time.
The short answer here is that directly addressing a threat from a foreign adversary formally designated by both the legislative and executive branches long before the particular controversy before the court affords the government a lot more latitude than they would have in other cases.
I’m not sure anyone is disputing that, certainly I’m not.
There is an adjacent point that many of us feel is just as important, which is that there is evidence in the public record (see Snowden disclosures among others) that there is lawbreaking or at least abuse of clearly stated constitutional liberties taking place domestically in the consumer internet space and has been for a long time.
Both things can be true, and both are squarely on topic for this debate whether on HN or in the Senate Chambers.
It's still completely legal for Meta to sell that user data to Chinese owned companies. So no security is provided by this change. I see it as theatre.
I thought this too, but I think there's a new law for this as well:
"In a bipartisan measure, the House of Representatives unanimously pass a bill designed to protect the private information of all Americans by prohibiting data brokers from transferring that information to foreign adversaries such as China"
https://allen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
People keep coming up with other avenues by which China could get this information, but the court addresses that directly: the legislature is not required to address every instance of a compelling threat in one fell swoop.
China can show favorable political content to America and American youth.
American culture has been such an influencing force on the world due to our conduits, movies and music. TikTok is a Chinese conduit, and I do believe this is happening. Our culture can be co-opted, the Chinese had John Cena apologize to ALL of China. They can easily pay to have American influencers spin in a certain way, influencing everything.
China can benefit without doing any influencing. It can simply mine the vast amount of data it gets for sentiment analysis. Say they want to be more aggressive against the Philippines. They can do an analysis to gauge the potential outrage on the part of the American people. If it's low they can go ahead.
China has blocked US social media for years (decades perhaps?). I don't know if they've explicitly said all the reasons, but "social stability" is a big one.
The case turns on the fact that China is formally designated a foreign adversary. The statute doesn't allow the government to simply make up who its adversaries are on the fly, or derive them from some fixed set of first principles. There's a list, and it long predates this case.
Your mistake is assuming I'm thinking about any sort of legal definition. Adversarial nature doesn't require or government to declare it for it to exist.
Yes, there is a distinction there. The issue is that it's a small part of the overall problem when looked at the larger scale. The overarching issues of political influence at odds with individual citizens, hostile engagement-maximizing algorithms, adversarial locked-down client apps, and selling influence to the highest bidder are all there with domestically-incorporated companies. The government's argument basically hinges on "but when these companies do something really bad we can force domestic companies to change but we can't do the same for TikTok". That's disingenuous to American individuals who have been on the receiving end of hostile influence campaigns for over a decade, disingenuous to foreign citizens not in the US or China who can't control any of this, and disingenuous to our societal principles as we're still ultimately talking about speech.
First Amendment Right is only for American citizens, no? If you're a visitor to the US for example, you don't get the First Amendment protection against anything, you're a guest. Why doesn't the same principle apply to a foreign company? I don't see how banning tik tok affects your first amendment rights or first amendment rights of American companies - maybe you can explain?
The constitution applies to everyone within the borders of the country, not just citizens. Tourists still get due process, can say what they want, cannot be forced to house american soldiers in their hotel, etc.
No idea if this applies to companies, but foreign visitors do get protections.
>The constitution applies to everyone within the borders of the country
Minor clarification that some parts specify "citizen" (e.g. voting). Others specify "person" or "resident" or the like, which would be anyone within the border.
The Constitution binds the activity of the government, individuals are irrelevant. Congress is forbidden from passing a law that violates the inalienable rights of humans, freedom of speech and association being one that is conveniently enumerated in the first amendment.
You will not find anywhere in the text that limits this to citizenship (with the sparse examples of the concept of citizenship coming up being things like eligibility for presidential office). The purpose of the Constitution is to spell out the abilities of the government, and one of the things it is expressly forbidden from doing is passing laws that curtail peoples' ability to communicate or associate.
The People chose to use TikTok as their free press. The US government has banned a tool The People were using for speech. The government utilized a specious argument of "security" in denying The People to their free press comprised of TikTok. The government provided zero evidence of national security being compromised. If anything, the US government has called into question how they are using data from US-based social media companies such that we may now expect reprisals from all around the world - maybe that's what they wanted?
Programs like Prism [0] certainly lend credence to the idea that this ban reflects the US’ own behavior in terms of how it uses data. However Prism was markedly different given it collected data vs being a dial the government can turn to produce a given outcome in the consumers of the content.
All of the congressional hearings over the past ~15 years demonstrates how business in the US is still pretty much governed by the rule of law. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t some shadow cabal working with Musk and Zuckerberg to control our minds. However we know that the CCP absolutely manages what the public can consume, so personally while I’m no fan of heavy handed government intervention in business, this ban seems like “a good thing” to me. We must protect the short, middle and long term prospects of our population — it’s a fundamental duty of the federal government to do so.
I agree that evidence would be nice, but let's not pretend TikTok is simply a 'speech platform' for 'The People'. It is an app on your mobile phone collecting data about you and making it available to a foreign adversary and feeding you content controlled by a foreign adversary.
Ridiculous statement. You must believe they should have political speech then? Maybe they should be able to donate to elections or even vote too? Why stop at corporations?
If they want speech, they should reside in the US, not just own a piece of a company that does.
The rights enforced inside the US are very generous compared to most countries and many apply to both legal and illegal residents, but restricting some rights, especially political ones, is crucial to have a sovereign state
Unless you work directly for the US government in some way, you are perfectly free to get on a VPN and continue using tiktok. And unlike your chinese friends, you don't even need to break the law to do it.
If we banned all Chinese business with America, America would hurt a lot more than China. Our plutocracy made sure of that fact decades ago.
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
Where were you for the last 10+ years when China was blocking all social media from the US but the US wasn’t blocking it? Or does hypocrisy just apply to the USA? It seems like you have some kind of agenda unrelated to the pure concept of hypocrisy.
The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
For the same reason Grindr was forced to sell to a non-Chinese parent, the risks of putting some apps / information in the hands of strategic competitors is too high. If a domestic company tried to blackmail people with their sexual history, they face domestic legal accountability. China does not.
That's an interesting hypothetical, I have another one.
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.
It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.
This is a common criticism in these kinds of discussions, but no, protecting oneself from foreign influence and threats does not require a moral high-ground, just as locking your front door doesn't.
For some reason I can't reply to "luddit3" below you. But he should check a list of countries that started the most wars and invasions in the last 150 years and which one tops it easily.
There is no good, just bad and kill-it-with-fire kind of evil. You choose bad you get a bad life. You choose the other you get literally hell. One government harvests and sells the organs of its healthy population[0][1][2] and the other makes some people feel sad.
Ironically, the "good" guys here allow you to talk shit on the internet about them while the "bad" guys would catch and harvest my organs someday for writing this comment.
Then China would just fall back to bombarding them with propaganda on one of the other large social media platforms that are prone to both known and unknown influence.
They would be within their rights to do that. But then they would have to compete with other participants in the discussion. On TikTok they can ensure there is no such competition.
The magnitude of the attack is not comparable. One thing is being a bad actor in a network owned by someone else where you can get monitored, caught and banned. Versus owning the network completely and amplifying messages with ease at scale. The effort needed and effectiveness of the attack is extremely different.
Domestic based social media platforms can be pressured to comply with demands such as the DOJ's investigation into Russia's 2016 disinformation campaign on Facebook. Likewise social media platforms based in a foreign adversary would be pressured to comply with demands of that foreign adversary.
You are free to have that our opinion but our elected government disagrees with you. It’s not the job of the court to adjust laws based on personal preference of HN commenters.
Sorry, While I understand that there are degrees of interest misalignment, I'm not sure what Hitler's interests refers to in this context. Hitler is deceased so it's unlikely his interests are relevant in a discussion about TikTok.
US-made missiles are blowing stuff up inside Russia because Russia invaded a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US. And yet Russian apps are in our app stores. Nobody needs to imagine.
I would argue that Telegram is a much, much larger security threat to the average individual American than Tiktok. Except they comply with government search warrants and don't enable E2E encryption by default so they are useful to the American National Security Establishment and get to stay.
No servers in Russia. Given Pavel's prior history it seems unlikely that he would cooperate with Russian government. Plenty of other criticism of telegram is warranted but it's probably not a tool of the Russian government.
There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).
Wouldn't banning the collection of this confidential data provide a better solution? Meta could still turnaround and sell this information to Chinese companies.
My preference would be a law that bans some specific activity (i.e. the collection of some set of data that should remain "private"). From there it would be straightforward to establish when an application (like TikTok or Instagram) was collecting this data and they could be prosecuted or their application banned at that point.
This banning of TikTok because of "national security" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Might the next application banned on these ground be domestic? It's unsettling, in my opinion, to see this precedent set.
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
Your question is irrelevant because none of the parties you've listed have interests that are aligned with the CCP, assuming you're referring to the people as a whole. Obviously there are specific individuals whose interests are aligned with China's government but laws in a democracy aren't meant to make everyone happy, they're meant to meet the interests of the majority of people
That's not what I said, I said that the interests of the majority do not align with the interests of the Chinese government. That seems self evident to me but YMMV
Don't you know, China is the new enemy of the US. That's what the elites in the US have decided and that is enough to be considered as the will of the people.
> none of the parties you've listed have interests that are aligned with the CCP
The interest of the people is to have a peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, while the interest of the military-industrial complex is to keep the tension high at all times so that more and more money is spent on armaments.
Who do you think the US government will favor in the end?
Who has more power to determine the result of the next elections, considering that to run a presidential campaign you need more than a billion dollars?
No citizen gains from war except the few that sell weapons and want to exploit other countries.
Domestic governments shouldn't let hostile foreign governments the ability to exert soft power over 1/2 of their population. Hence why China banned all USA based tech companies from operating there.
The opinion is mostly not about control over recommendation algorithms; it goes out of its way to say that the data collection is dispositive. Check out Gorsuch's concurrence for some flavor of how much more complicated this would be with respect to the recommender.
As a Chinese grown up within the Great Firewall, now I began to really feel all the hypocrisy around the matter of "freedom of Internet". It seems the block of Facebook and Twitter in China is surely justified at the very begining, for the same "national security" grounds. China have exactly the same amount of reason to believe the US is stealing data or propelling propaganda by social network.
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
TikTok is also blocked by the GFW in China, so this puts the USA on par with blocking it also. Weirdly enough, Douyin isn’t banned, specifically, so you should still be able to use it in the states.
So if you use the American app store to install TikTok, it works just fine, even for the falun dafa content? Interesting. I've heard that tiktok.com is actually blocked by the GFW, so even if you have the app, you still can't view content without a VPN, but I guess I can check for sure in a few months.
Obviously the USA doesn't have a GFW, so they can't actually block tiktok, just ban it from the app store and prevent business from resolving in the US around it (e.g. paying content creators).
The funny thing is that when China did that, it was unanimously condemned in the Western world as an authoritarian move, and often use as an example of why China was a dictatorship with no freedom of speech, etc. But now it's actually the normal thing to do?
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
The concern isn't broadly that "social media companies have data". The concern is the governing environment that those companies operate in, which can be coopted for competing national security purposes.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
The "example" being banning things for nebulous reasons? If anything this is the US following China's lead in restricting what software their citizens can access.
> If you believe in liberal values (with a small l), like freedom of speech, you lead by example
America is ridiculously pro free speech. That doesn’t mean we must then tolerate libel, slander, fraud, false advertising, breach of contract, et cetera because someone screams free speech.
The Bill of Rights exists in balances, and the First Amendment is balanced, among other the things, with the nation’s requirement to exist. That doesn’t mean the Congress can ban speech. But it can certainly regulate media properties, including by mandating maximum foreign ownership fractions.
> one group of people which have made any criticism of them carry legal consequences
Jews? You know we have other federally-protected classes, correct?
If you’re referring to Israel, no, there aren’t legal consequences for criticising Israel. Half of the vocal minority of the internet is constantly up in arms about Israel.
Are you aware of this Wikipedia page? [0]
I think you should motivate why you believe that what is described in that page should not be called "constitution". Or articulate why you believe that thing does not exist. Or at least motivate your statement. Where does it come from?
China has a constitution mostly like America’s, freedom of speech, religion, press are enshrined even more strongly than in the American constitution. What China lacks is judicial review and an independent judiciary, so the constitution has no enforcement mechanism, and so is meaningless. The Chinese government as formed has no interest in rule of law.
The Chinese constitution, in addition to endowing rights, also endows obligations.
So while you have things like:
> Article 35 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
You also have things like:
> Article 54 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland’s security, honor or interests.
It doesn't matter because the law is completely at the mercy of officials to interpret and enforce. A Chinese court was once asked to clarify contradicting interpretation from officials, and they got seriously beat down for it because it isn't the job of the judiciary to tell the officials how to interpret law. The only way an officials ruling is overturned is if their boss (or someone up the hierarchy) disagrees.
Compare this to the Supreme court, which is supposedly in Trump's hands, ruling against Trump twice on this tiktok ban alone (the first to kill his executive order, and the second to not pause the law to wait for him to take office).
If US wants to imitate China, they should imitate its industry not its restrictions to freedoms.
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
very true, everything started on the seventh and ended thanks to the strength of the new American president and now it’s all fine again as it was before the seventh. no need for political movements or anything, lets concentrate on the more positive things as Musk said.
Why do you think that Bezos and Zuckerberg have seen the light with the elections if the US government has nothing to do with these private enterprises?
Twitter and Meta are foreign everywhere else, everywhere else except China TikTok is foreign as well and apparently they all lick their respective governments.
And if Twitter and Meta are found to be interfering with national interests in foreign countries and get banned or reeled in due to that, how is that a bad outcome for the world?
it is a bad outcome because it means everyone is locked in their propaganda locality and theres no one to break the narrative. IMHO it’s beneficial to have a global network as we are living on a planet with artificial borders.
Exactly how I expect things to pan out. Some 10-15 years ago the countries with dictatorships had the idea that they need to control the discussions on internet, now it is the US. I expect it to have cascading effect as Twitter, FB, Instagram etc are all foreign companies with known associations with the US government and intelligence and ban those everywhere fir national security reasons.
> The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza.
I don't see how this law banning a social media site brings us at all closer to a world where Americans cannot get access to accurate information about major global conflicts. This is so far down the imagined "slippery slope" as to be absurd. In fact, I'd strongly argue that this law would achieve the opposite. If you're relying on Tik Tok for accurate information like this, then you are opening yourself to echo chambers, biased takes, and outright propaganda. There are many excellent sources out there in America freely available and easily accessible.
If your concern is editorial preference, then wouldn't a social media application explicitly controlled by a State apparatus be a concern?
I fail to see how anything going on at Twitter is relevant to what I mentioned. Does Twitter shifting its content priorities somehow make the plethora of excellence sources unavailable?
FWIW facebook was blocked in 2009, after ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) (allegedly) used it to organise the July Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to follow Chinese law and cooperate with the police to identify the perpetrators.
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
This is being positioned as a national security issue that a foreign government has so much influence over the US public (and data on people if they want, like geolocation, interests, your contacts, etc).
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
Legally, the national security component is relatively minor to the case. It's played up to be the justification for the law but SCOTUS doesn't really get to decide whether that is good justification or even correct.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a National Security Concern.
SCOTUS doesn't really get to decide whether that is good justification or even correct
They do, and they did. From the ruling:
The Act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are
designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adver-
sary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to
capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This ob-
jective qualifies as an important Government interest un-
der intermediate scrutiny.
My point was that SCOTUS didn't review whether there was a compelling national security interest or not – they didn't review any of the classified material, etc. SCOTUS didn't consider whether or not it was good or meaningful policy, they simply accepted the national security argument which more-or-less required them to uphold the DC court's application of intermediate scrutiny.
Indeed - if the US is this afraid of a popular social network under foreign control then every country outside the US should be petrified.
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
I have no horses in the race but if you justify a Tiktok ban in the US because of a foreign influence, you also do justify a Facebook ban in the EU on the same arguments.
Sounds like a great opportunity for the US government to inform the people on what's the actual truth. You say Americans don't believe their government anymore? I wonder why...
Do you think the truth is, like, inherently more compelling than lies? If Americans don't believe their government anymore, how is their government supposed to use China's lies to highlight the truth?
Because China is a rival geopolitical power and the US is... us.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
No. The U.S. court should make decisions in the U.S. interest. But this HN thread represents people from around the world who may not share the U.S. interest at a personal level. Leading to remarks which are trying to sway US opinion.
In a way, this thread could very well be monitored and commented on by a non US nation state
> no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us,
In the context of a discussion on a US-specific ban on TikTok I'm taking the "us" in OP's post to mean people in the US. If you aren't in the US the ban doesn't apply to you so the discussion is irrelevant.
HN is literally banned in China [1][2]. And since VPNs are also illegal in China, they're breaking the law if they are here. I doubt they'd break the law if they had such a strong allegiance to China.
Right, its because a law should be passed regulating this sort of data for the good of all citizens, but our congress can't / won't pass that, so they only stepped in when it became an obvious national security concern.
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
Yeah it's not even a point of view that requires nuance; it's pretty clearly a matter of US interests v. adversarial interests. Anecdotally, a lot of people that struggle to understand this are also squarely in the camp of assuming that the US is doing data collection solely for nefarious purposes.
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
It seems like two different arguments if you s/US/multi-national-corporations/g in that sentence. I don't have that much faith that multi-national-corporations interests align with US (or China for that matter).
They're headquartered in the US with substantial US ownership, which is the same logic applied to Tiktok. Zuckerberg's pretty heavily rooted in the US with no obvious inclination to leave, and you can see the effect that the change in administrations is having on his steering of Meta as a whole.
The thing is, doing it domestically is also a national security concern. We know that data leaks and breaches don't only happen, they are commonplace. Banning TikTok but continuing to allow domestic social media companies to amass hoards of the same kind of data without any real oversight is like saying, "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."
It's not leaks and breaches that are the immanent concern here. The concern is deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment -- a psyops asset that gives a competing nation significant leverage as they pursue ends that challenge established US interests in the Pacific.
You don't have to agree that protecting those interests is worth the disruption to the global market, free speech ideology, etc. But to engage in the debate, you need to recognize that this is the core concern.
But it’s cool for Elon Musk to do it to get Trump elected, or zuck to do it for who knows what aims (but certainly expanding his own influence and power)
>The concern is deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment -- a psyops asset that gives a competing nation significant leverage as they pursue ends that challenge established US interests in the Pacific.
I share the exact same concern about "deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment" from US-based corporations running algorithmically-generated designed to addict consumers, and also believe that everyone needs to recognize that core concern as well.
I can see information on this specific event on Wikipedia, CNN, Youtube, etc right now; all "western-controlled". It's also available through Al-Jazeera, Reuters, and other foreign sources.
You have an interesting and unique definition of "state censorship". Almost like one defined by a bias inherently interested in letting specific foreign interests continue to proliferate under the guise of an emotional appeal.
Raises eyebrow I’m talking about watching the video. And surely you understand the content moderation will be different once the cat is out of the bag.
Tiktok was banned primarily for influence, secondarily for data.
The influence is what law makers care far more about. Remember what Russia was doing on facebook in 2016? Now imagine that Russia actually owned facebook at the time.
> "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."
Right, and silver is better than nothing.
I think many of us on HN would agree that US social media companies having the means to manipulate user sentiment via private algorithms is a bad thing. But it's at least marginally better than a foreign adversary doing so because US companies have a base interest in the US continuing to be a functional country. Plus it's considerably more difficult to pass a law covering this domestically, where US tech giants have vested interests, lobbyists and voters they can manipulate.
So yes, a targeted ban against a foreign-owned company isn't the ideal outcome. But it's not difficult to see why it's considered a better outcome than doing nothing at all.
You're not wrong that domestic threats exist as well. But perhaps the biggest thing to know that may help you understand, is that the national security apparatus operates within the paradigm of what is called 5GW, or Fifth Generation Warfare[1]. 5GW is all about information, and a foreign adversary controlling the algorithmic news feed of 170 million Americans for an average 1 hour a day is important in that context.
I'm still not sure I understand the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances. Or the "metadata" those 17 year olds produce. Are people sharing nuclear secrets on TikTok or something (and not doing the same on US services)?
I haven't followed this closely, but I assumed it was related to a foreign entity having the ability to hyper-target content towards said 17 year olds (and the entire userbase in general) -- A modern form of psychological warfare.
The concern is they won't be 17 forever. 5/10/20/30 years down the line some small portion of these kids are going to hold important jobs, and some of them will have worthwhile blackmail material in their tiktok history.
OK, wild. It's farfetched, but at least the "blackmail" angle makes a little bit of sense. Still strangely targeted. There are a lot of other apps where people are making "potential blackmail" material.
You can still push a particular group of those 17-year olds pushing specific views to influence elections. As long as some proportion of the electorate watches stuff on TikTok.
> the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances
C'mon, we can have a more informed conversation than that.
TikTok is an entertainment platform the average young American watches for more than an hour a day. Videos cover just about any topic imaginable. We just had an election. Is it really so impossible to imagine a foreign power adjusting the algorithm to show content favorable to one candidate over another? It's entirely within their power and they have every motive.
So why a single product? Young people watch content from way more than a single app. And reportedly (from my kid) they are all just moving over to a different Chinese content-sharing app. If we're worried about "foreign" influence, shouldn't we be blocking all non-US sources of information that young people might watch and be influenced by? It looks pretty ham-fisted to just target one of those sources.
How did they find TikTok originally? Or Snapchat, or all the other silly apps they use? We're all being bombarded with marketing and advertising every day. Maybe this new app is good at marketing and the product itself is as good as TikTok, who knows, I don't use either of them.
The TikTok ban would have been the perfect opportunity for any number of competing US social media apps to swoop in and offer TT's current users a replacement, but they seem to have all failed to address that market.
The trouble I have is that Facebook & X do this, too, and their owners are similarly unaccountable to US law, but we aren't we banning them. If this law were applied equally, I'd be all in favor. Instead it is transparently just a handout to Facebook to remove a business competitor. That sucks, big time.
I share that concern. But I also recognize that passing an equivalent law for domestic social media networks would be considerably less likely to pass. Perfect as the enemy of good and all that.
I work from the basic principle that a foreign, government-controlled adversary having control over discourse is worse than a domestic company having the same, despite strongly disliking both.
Just at a base level, Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are, though it's very unlikely, arrestable. Can't say the same for TikTok.
> Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are arrestable.
I suspect this is our fundamental disagreement. I disagree with both of these statements. Facebook's & X's executives have a vested interested in power and money for themselves and their peers. These oligarchs are in practice above the law, just like China's and Russia's oligarchs are. This decision only gives them even more control. It's bad for those US citizens who are not in the oligarch class.
I don't think Tiktok will bring about the end of America as a functioning country. I do think Facebook's executives have an interest in gaining control for themselves at any cost, up to & including the end of America as a country if that is the most profitable route for themselves.
Put another way, I think China & Facebook's execs are about equal in terms of danger to US citizens (I'd probably give the edge to Facebook's execs, since they have direct control over US policy, but we're splitting hairs here). So banning one but not the other is a crappy situation, because it concentrates that power even further.
Because it’s used to influence elections worldwide. Most recently the first round of the Romanian elections were won by an unheard of pro-Russian candidate who ran a disinformation campaign on TikTok, allegedly organised by the Kreml.
Do you have any proof that the Chinese government played a role in his campaign? Because the 2016 United States election was possibly influenced by disinformation campaigns on Facebook, yet there is no ban and Zuck is taking an even more lax approach to moderation than Tiktok.
I don’t understand why people are so obtuse about national security being an excuse. Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines? This is about neutering our biggest global economic threat.
National security doesn't have to mean they use the app to take over the devices it is installed on. It can also be used to spread misinformation or blackmail people.
This is the argument that a group of toddlers make when one of them gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. "Yeah...yah....but Mrs. Spangler, I saw Sally steal a cookie last week". OK, cool....your friend is stealing one now and currently has their hand in the cookie jar.
Terrible comparison. China hasn’t been caught doing anything nefarious with Tiktok whereas Facebook was caught red handed. The problem is a tiktok ban is based on speculation and playing on the fears of the american people. The irony is the story is pitched as China using tiktok to program a bunch of american monkeys, meanwhile our own government is programming us with “china is the adversary”
Sally stole a cookie from the cookie jar and now the teacher is pointing at the fat kid and not letting him be in the classroom alone with the cookie jar. Just bc he is fat.
Economics, prestige, etc. It’s worth a lot to China to be competing with the US in social media / Internet stuff. China (and Russia) have been pushing a narrative that the US operates on two sets of rules for them vs everyone else.
The US is happy to invade countries and turns a blind eye to Israeli aggression but Russia or China want to do it and they are met with sanctions etc. The last bastion of American exceptionalism was how it’s a free market and values free speech and free competition.
There was a national security threat but the US walked right into it: China is making a move for the top spot as global hegemon. It’s recruiting other countries to say don’t work with the US, work with us instead. The US flinched. Ralph blew the conch and all the kids just installed RedNote .
I’d assume the concern is more swaying public opinion, sowing division to make us incapable of unified political effort, or even to destabilize us, things like that, not so much infiltrating networks - they already manufacture much of that equipment.
If I understand correctly how it works, it’s a propagandist’s dream, building personalized psych profiles on each person. You could imagine that it’d be the perfect place to try generating novel videos to fit specific purposes, as well - the signals from this could feed back directly into the loss functions for the generative models.
I think politicians’ efforts to regulate tech are generally not great, but I think this one is pretty spot-on.
> Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines?
The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.
This law is dumb, because in no way does it prevent the exact same data to be collected, processed by a US entity and then transferred to China.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
Because personal data about US citizens is up for sale to more or less whoever wants it, and the US government doesn’t seem to have a problem with this otherwise.
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
Laws don't have to solve all of the potential problems that may exist in order to be valid (this is one of the things they talk about in the decision).
X or Facebook isn’t “us”. If we had any reason to believe there were or were even likely to be strong effective democratic controls over their ability to manipulate public sentiment it might be different. But as it stands, it feels more like local oligarchs kicking out competitors in their market: “the US population is our population to manipulate, go back to your own”.
Because it's not clear what the national security concern is. With weapons or infrastructure, it's easy to understand how they can be used against the U.S., but with a social media platform, it's harder to see the threat. The concern really seems to lie with the users of TikTok.
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
I think one of the issues is the details of the national security risk hasn't been articulated well. I haven't followed this in detail, but from what I've seen in summaries, news articles etc is just a vague notion of a theoretical risk from an adversary, with no details on exactly what the risk is, or if there is an actual issue here (vs just a theoretical issue that can happen at some point).
But US companys sale all info about users anyway to anyone (just see today GM) and you accept in between often to over 800 cookies on websites. If thats ok, whats the difference. Why is it ok a website does include over 800 cokies?
Foreign propaganda bots are just as present on US social media, and US social media amplify them just as much.
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
Because they're trying to ignore the national security aspect to talk about tracking generically. Which is a valid argument and a good discussion to be had, but it's irrelevant in this context.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
Because the Chinese are openly hostile towards the United States and its interests, whereas American companies have a vested interest in the U.S. and are beholden to its laws.
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
What is stupid in these replies to me is that people seemingly think the interests of american companies and the american working class are somehow aligned.
(a) American companies’ business interests don’t fully align with the needs of their users or the general public,
and that
(b) the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives —which include weakening, destabilizing, and impoverishing the United States— are even less aligned with the interests of American citizens.
What of fox news then? Does spreading lies and dividing the population not count as destabilization as well? American media agencies are not immune to being coopted by the russian, iranian, chinese governments, or really the whims of any oligarch. There is no protective mechanism. The entities that represent the source of truth in this country can be bought and sold like an equity.
While I agree with you about domestic policy, I'm not sure why it's inconsistent or hypocritical to deal with an external threat posed from those who want to destroy or harm you.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
The comparison isn't even close. TikTok's relationship with the Chinese government is well-documented, not "supposed". They are legally required to share data under China's National Intelligence Law. The Chinese government has also a track record of pushing disinformation and find any way to destabilize Western democracies.
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
> Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
Judging by your karma and registration date, you spend some time here on HN. There have been lots of good answers why; they are the many prior discussions of this topic.
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
Check out the scandal in Romania, some guy that had less than 5% in polls got 30% because of tiktok. Other candidates had tiktok campaigns too but probably didn't use bots.
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls... a few months after banning another candidate, Sosoaca, for, and I cite textually, "calling for the removal of fundamental state values and choices, namely EU and NATO membership".
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
I'm no lawyer and can't be arsed to do the proper research but for Georgescu to be able to declare he had 0 campaign spending while everyone knows that the tiktok campaign cost 20-50 million euros is insane to me.
If they aren't already prosecuting him on this I guess technically it's legal but such a weird loophole in the law. Any spending towards promoting a candidate should be public knowledge imo. EDIT: he was claiming bullshit like GOD chose him and that's how he got that good of a result. I guess his God is the people in the shadows that made his tiktok campaign lol
> For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls
I think they did it for many reasons but not because he didn't show up in polls.
Top ones are:
- PSD didn't advance in the second round and they had the leverage to pull it off
- Georgescu was clearly anti-NATO so maybe the US pulled strings
- Danger of having a president with Russian sympathies
- He was claiming that he didn't spend a single dime on the election while everyone in the know knows that his tiktok campaign cost sever million euros
I mean that the only evidence that his votes came from the TikTok campaign is that he didn't show up in polls and unexpectedly obtained a great result. So they automatically assume the delta between expected and obtained votes are people manipulated by the TikTok campaign (which apparently are assumed to have become some kind of zombies whose opinion doesn't count).
Out of the fourth reasons you list at the end, only the fourth is not pure authoritarianism (why wouldn't people in a democracy be free to elect a president that dislikes NATO or likes Russia if that is their will?). Campaign funding fraud has happened in many Western countries but typically it's handling by imposing fines, maybe some jail time, but definitely not cancelling the result of an entire election.
I'm not naive enough to believe we live in a true democracy. IMO this cancelling was good for 2 reasons : first I believe Georgescu is a nutjob, second.. if there was any doubt that we don't live in a true democracy now it's pretty clear.
And considering the level of education of most of the Romanian population I believe having "true" democracy would destroy the country. I understand this may not be a popular opinion but I'm trying to be realistic here lol
I actually sympathize with all that. Over the past few decades, I have slowly become increasingly skeptical about true, unfettered democracy being the best form of government. In the past, although the level of education probably was worse than now, the fact that people got their news from rather centralized sources controlled by elites acted as a "nutjob filter". With social networks, we are witnessing what should be the true power of democracy (people electing candidates in spite of what the elites think), but it can easily create monsters.
I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.
optimistically, this is the first step towards banning or at least forcing more transparency for all algorithmic feeds. there's absolutely similar concerns about the leadership of American companies being able to sway public opinion in whatever direction they choose via promotion or demotion of viewpoints. but it's only been possible to convince those with the power to stop them of the danger from China, because while probably none of the companies have "America's best interests" at heart when tuning their algorithms, it's much clearer that China has reason to actively work against American national interests (even just demoting honest critique of China is something to be wary of)
Clearly the US government would like only US companies to collect this kind of data. Eliminating the biggest competitors for companies like Google, X and Meta is likely just the icing on the cake.
Yeah it could be broader for sure, would prefer it to be an allowlist rather than a blocklist, but the presence of a workaround doesn't make banning something pointless, and as the SC pointed out in their decision, a law does not need to solve all problems in one fell swoop in order for it to be valid.
I just wish we could ban user-tracking (and data brokers) entirely so we wouldn't have this problem to begin with, or at least not to the current extent.
Keeping the data securely inside our country is never going to work if China can simply open their wallet and spend billions of $ to obtain the data.
It sounds like you have ignored all the answers and then you're saying there's no good answers?
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
> there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
I'm mainly thinking of Snowden, who wasn't afforded whistleblower protections, and who mainly distributed through foreign media like Der Spiegel and The Guardian.
> You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see.
Just because something has been repeated in the news 20000 times, it doesn't make it true without evidence. Speculation is just it: speculation.
As far as I've seen, it's not Chinese company spying on me, it's US ones, it's not Chinese companies hacking Wifis in all major airports to track regular citizens, it's US ones, it's not Chinese intelligence spying on European politicians, it's US ones, it's not Chinese diplomacy drawing the line between rebels/protesters, good or bad geopolitically, it's always Washington, it's not Chinese intelligence we know of hacking major European infrastructure and bypassing SCADA, it's US one.
The elephant in the room is US' fixation for exceptionalism and being self authorized to do whatever it pleases while at the same time making up geopolitical enemies and forcing everybody to follow.
I don't buy it, I'm sorry. I don't particularly like the Chinese system, I don't particularly love their censorship, and I don't particularly like their socials on our ground when our ones are unable to operate there (unless they abide to Chinese laws, which are restricting and demand user data non stop, something they are very willing to do in US though).
My beef is with American's exceptionalism and with the average American Joe who cannot see the dangers posed by the foreign policy of its own country. The US should set the example and then pretend the same, instead it does worse than everybody and cries that only it can. It's dangerous.
1) You can not protect users from being influenced by the media they consume-- that is basically the very nature of the thing.
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
SCOTUS explicitly avoided ruling on this justification, and it seemed at argument that even some of the conservative justices were uncomfortable with the free speech implications of it.
It's not a top down broadcast and the SCOTUS has a hard time wrapping their head around 250 individual people receiving individualized content with no oversight or necessity for accuracy.
Isn’t that already happening? Fox news parroting russian talking points to sow division among the working class population of this country? Why is that fine? Because they get Rs in power in the process?
Where in that CNBC article does it say that it's fine for US companies to do that? I don't see that anywhere, yet that's the point you're claiming is being made.
This isn't true, US companies are allowed to operate in China. They just eventually choose not to because complying with Chinese censorship laws is too much trouble, but in that sense they are not too different from Chinese companies. Facebook for example operated in China for many years until they decline to comply with a ruling on Xinjiang (which may have been the moral decision).
Plenty of good answers have already been put forward. But in case you're asking in good faith, here are the two main ones:
1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
> Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
I disagree; and it's the dismissal for the past 13-14 years of China as an immediate threat which is what has in part allowed China to become such a large longer-term threat.
> They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer
I would put it differently: China wants its own global hegemony instead of the U.S.' -- and that's understandable (everyone wants to rule the world). But if the U.S. doesn't want that to happen then it has to take steps to counter it.
The GFW doesn't just block websites/networks/content that is controlled by adversarial foreign governments, but all websites/networks/content which the CCP is unable to censor. The GFW is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the CCP's control.
The bill introduced by the Supreme Court doesn't just block Tiktok that is controlled by Bytedance, but all websites/networks/content which the POTUS deems "adversarial". The law is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the government control.
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
> won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases
that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary.
As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)
> If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on.
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
I agree with point #1, but then this ban should also include the US controlled sites - having the main office in the US doesn't mean the data is any more secure, or that the products do less harm socially.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
Re #2 -- while there is a tit-for-tat element here, forcing a sale of TikTok or removing it from the App stores, is still worlds apart from the type of censoring of information that the Chinese government engages in. So it's not a case of "we want to do the same thing". If you've lived in China (I have) you'll know what I'm talking about.
Good clarification - I'm not saying we're adopting all the same policies, but it is a step in that direction, and I think we need to have a clear line saying we never do anything close to that. Similar to the "first they came" poem, this could be used to justify further expansion of this power, and that poem does start with "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist"
Agreed that there's always a risk that something like this sets a precedent for abuse of power to control information by the US government. And we know that the US gov is not beyond spying on its citizens (Snowden, NSA). However, there are still fairly robust safeguards in place in the US by virtual of the political structure, to make this much less likely to happen. Those same safeguards make it unlikely that while Trump and Elon would almost certainly exercise the degree of control that Xi has if they could, they are prevented from the worst by the structure in place.
The problem in China is that there weren't strong safeguards to prevent a totalitarian control (CCP is supposed to be democratic within itself in that leaders are elected, though it's all restricted to party members, of course), and when Xi came into power he was able, within a few years, to sweep aside all opposition, primarily through "anti-corruption campaigns". So he now has a degree of control and power that would be a wet dream for Trump. (And you should see the level of adulation in the newspapers there.)
Now in the US we have a separate problem, and that is we have a system where unelected people like Elon and Zuckerberg, Murdoch, etc., exercise a tremendous amount of influence over the population through their policies and who are pursuing a marriage between authoritarian politics and big business (by the way, there's a term for this, it's called "fascism"). That is a serious problem -- but it's separate from the TikTok issue and shouldn't be used to discount the dangers of the CCP having control over a highly popular social network in the US.
It's about psychological manipulation of Americans. TikTok is a completely different experience in China. Social media influences us in negative ways. And the Chinese government can and does take advantage of that.
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
Back in the early stage of social media, US companies had the choice to operate in China as long as they comply with the censorship and local laws. Had they chosen not to quit China market at the point, they would have been probably huge in China holding major access over Chinese users too. (How would Chinese government react to that is something we never get to see now...)
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
Good point, but still that's not reciprocity. Allowing the CCP to fine tune their propaganda at American citizens while US companies have to comply with heavy handed censorship is not a fair trade.
It is, and if this a stepping stone to that conversation, that’s a good thing. Great even. If you expect to have everything at once, you’ll make no progress.
Why would you want an outside nation to have an outsized influence America's social fabric? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60 Chomsky laid out manufacturing consent decades ago and while his thesis revolves around traditional media heavily influencing thought-in-America, the influencing now happens from algorithmic based feeds. Tik Tok controls the feed for many young American minds.
The rational for why TikTok should be banned in the United States is precisely the same rational why Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al, should be banned in other countries.
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
Why do we need a good answer? Does US need to be a good guy on some made up rules? Post Soviet collapse, US could have just taken over a bunch of territories. We don’t alway need to be some faithful country when the rest of the world is always messing up asking for millions of Americans to spill blood. I think RoW take US goodwill for granted. We don’t need to play nice. That’s not how competition works.
I do, but there is no data or evidence supporting said non-resident corporation is under control of an adversary, so why should I believe anything the government claims? If you're going to talk about security, just stop, nearly every component in your phone is produced in China, and you still use that everyday.
At the very least they have an export ban on the "algorithms" which is why they won't sell, and chinese control, especially under Xi, is well documented, so I don't know what kind of smoking gun you'd expect. It'd be more unusual if there was a laissez faire position by the government.
Regardless, assembly of an iPhone with Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese components in China is not the same as mass surveillance as a service.
I asked for evidence or even some data, show me something that can verify anything you're saying beyond a reasonable doubt. You can't, you're basically regurgitating talking points on topics neither of us really know anything about. I'm not saying I'm against a ban, but "China evil" shouldn't be good enough for a semi intelligent society.
In terms of algorithms, most US companies refer to that as intellectual property. Google doesn't sell their search algorithm to other search engines so I don't think your point makes any sense. Companies keep their IP secret for a reason, they don't want competition digging into their profits. What US company isn't engaging in the same completely legal behaviors?
My point about the phones is that China like America can target any electronic like the US was doing 20 years via interdiction. If we look at the NSA ANT catalog, specifically DIETYBOUNCE, everything they accuse China of is stuff we practically invented.
edit: Also I just purchased a M4 Mac mini, shipped directly from China.
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
The problem is framing information access as a threat. It is not and that's fundamentally not a First Amendment positive stance. If I want to gorge myself on Chinese propaganda it's my right as an American.
Because it's not the TWEAKING of the content tho tis the problem. It's the ability to manipulate individuals using fake or altered content.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge, and content. It's like a library of books vanishing, or a large city disappearing off of a map.
Yes, I believe so. It's way easier to upload something on tiktok with captions, voiceovers etc than on YouTube. You can have real communities instead of random channels.
a lot of chronic illness sub communities are bad and would be good to lose, just like cryptic pregnancy fb etc - they trigger latent mental illness in people
For those not in the know, why is cryptic pregnancy tiktok bad?
I'd never heard of it, and from what I understand, it's a hashtag people use to share stories of how they found out they were pregnant late in the pregnancy because they didn't have pregnancy symptoms. But I don't understand why that would be bad for people to share/consume.
And for every video of quality on the platform, there's one that's blatant political propaganda, one that's blatant conspiratorial misinformation, one that's sexualizing children, etc.
It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.
The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.
Popular sites come and go. It has admittedly been a few years since we had a big shakeup of where people go to doomscroll, but this is not a paradigm shift -- it is just a chance to see who picks up the slack. It is mildly interesting speculating on whether an existing site will absorb it or if something new will come along. And it is possible TikTok will just keep running. But either way, people gonna make content, people gonna consume content.
No one is deleting data. You just can't run the app in the US anymore. If someone cares to archive this junk, they can just do it from Australia or wherever.
Why do you call it junk? Is everything on YouTube junk, because there are some really bad and fake prank jokes? Is everything on here junk, because some people don't have the best intentions?
Seriously, even in Germany the public opinion about tiktok is so much influenced by people not even having used the app even once (seen some of the good parts of it).
Meh. If it were worth archiving then someone would be trying to archive it. Nothing the US law is doing would prevent that, even from within the US. If you're really concerned, then start working with ByteDance or archive.org or whoever to actually preserve the data instead of whining that somehow it will be "lost" because you can't install the proprietary reader app from within the USA.
We also risk losing so much utter nonsense and false information that I'm not at all worried. You want to learn history and science? Buy some (vetted) history and science books.
The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.
Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.
Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".
One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.
Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.
I believe Biden says his admin won't enforce the ban, as they only have 1 day left in office after it goes into effect.
Trump has signaled he doesn't support the ban, and wants tiktok under american ownership. The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation around this, no surprise given the TikTok user base..
The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain - how both Biden and Trump can hint or announce they wont enforce the law. Signed laws upheld by the Supreme Court can be filtered out by the President? News to me.
The law makes it illegal for Oracle, Apple and Google to continue doing what they are doing. It does in fact make it illegal for some companies to operate with TikTok. The president can use this law in the future on other companies controlled by foreign adversaries to divest or face a ban.
They've announced that they won't enforce the fines required by the law. But yes, selective enforcement of laws is legal — it's how prosecutorial discretion works.
It's really quite funny to read the timeline in the opinion.
Essentially, Trump started the TikTok ban, Biden continued it, and Congress finally put it into law. And now both Trump and Biden, as well as Congress, are shying away from actually enforcing the ban.
• In August 2020, President Trump issued an Executive
Order finding that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in
[China] continues to threaten the national security, foreign
policy, and economy of the United States.”
• President Trump determined
that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the
platform “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users” and is susceptible to being used to
further the interests of the Chinese Government.
• Just days after issuing his initial Executive Order, President Trump ordered ByteDance Ltd. to divest all interests
and rights in any property “used to enable or support
ByteDance’s operation of the TikTok application in the
United States,” along with “any data obtained or derived
from” U. S. TikTok users.
• Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance Ltd. negotiated
with Executive Branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve those concerns. Executive Branch officials ultimately determined, however, that
ByteDance Ltd.’s proposed agreement did not adequately
“mitigate the risks posed to U. S. national security interests.” 2 App. 686. Negotiations stalled, and the parties
never finalized an agreement.
• Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Protecting
Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications
Act.
A simpler explaination, politicians were worried that Tiktok may influence mit-term and presidential elections, but it turns out a good place to run campaigns.
The whole thing, including Biden setting the deadline for literally the last day of his presidency, strikes me as extremely odd. I have no idea what the real story is here, but it very much seems that what is happening is not at all what it seems.
US used to be much smarter in general. Now that Trump is starting a 2nd term on Monday, the world over now realizes the US is comprised of a bunch of imbeciles. We've lost our prestige, and we'd been trading on it for a long, long time.
The Democrats loss fair and square. They should have spoken up a lot sooner. Everyone on the inside knew that Biden was incompetent. If they had a real primary would Kamala ever have been the nominee?
The Democrats lost strongholds like Miami of all places. The dumbest thing they did was go against the tech industry who have always been their biggest supporters. Would Republicans go after Evangelical Christians or the NRA?
To say that Miami was a democratic stronghold is not really accurate. They've leaned Democrat recently, but the margins haven't been that high, and they've been decreasing for a number of elections now.
So that was there whole platform - “we aren’t Trump”?
Do you think the population got more ignorant in 4 years? This is all on the DNC and Biden. Biden should have either voluntarily not run or stronger Democrats should have had a primary and crucified him.
The DNC lied to the American public for years. They knew that Biden wasn’t all there. They basically tried to do a “Weekend with Bernie” on them.
Not to mention that strategically for the first time in modern history they had the new industry titans in their back pocket - BigTech - and threw them under the bus.
The American population doesn’t care about going after BigTech like HN does.
Democrats lose due to significant ignorance in the population and successful propaganda by hostile entities. It's not an accident that the reddest states at the least educated and least literate. If you doubt that I'm happy to support the claim, but I think we both know it's true.
> They are completely out of touch with what the mainstream wants.
Democrats are the only party actually offering to give the majority what they want, but due to ignorance and propaganda the majority have become emotionally hostile to the means necessary to accomplish implementing what they want.
Despite Trump's promises that gullible desperate people fell for, his policies are likely to make things much harder for hid voters and not only not give them what they want, but give them what they explicitly don't want. Well, they'll still get bigoted policies, at least.
> Any other Democrat could have distanced themselves from Biden. But his own VP couldn’t.
There should have been no reason to. Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic. That people voted for him at all shows just how bad things are.
Democracy can't function with such a gullible population. At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
<< Democrats are the only party actually offering to give the majority what they want
<< Democracy can't function with such a gullible population.
I am trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but you are not making it easy. One could easily argue that given that Trump won, majority got what they want already. Please tell me that you understand what I am telling you now. I did manage to hear some people drawing appropriate conclusions from this cycle, but I am not certain you did.
<< Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic.
Yeah.. a felony in this case being the equivalent of a parking ticket in business; not to mention national level politics. It is hard for me understand why people have a hard time grasping that and/or why this was not a useful label for this election cycle. Hell, the moves taken ( including mug shot ) did the exact opposite of the desired effect.
<< At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
I long maintained that there should be a minimum level of 'something' required to vote. It used to be land, but anything that effectively makes one have a stake in the country would do. If possible, would you accept a restriction on the right to vote based on such a criterion?
> Yes, because of how ignorant much of the population is, correlating lower grocery prices with whoever was in office at the time.
Get off your high horse. If you lose the election, you are the ignorant. The democrats lost because they over-estimated their hand and under-estimated the intelligence of the general populace.
The democrats were in a position of power. The only thing you need to do is to not screw up.
They lost because 49.9% of voters believed inflation would be decreased by tariffs and all the money FEMA spent on North Carolina was a lie. Among other things, this was very much a “we have a different truth to offer” election.
Not sure why this is so complicated --- blame the DNC and party elites, not the population that voted for Trump.
If the DNC was trying to win, they would have never let Biden run for re-election, and then they would have never let Harris become the candidate without a primary.
The Democrats literally told the US population Trump was going to destroy democracy in America, and then created a situation that enabled him to win in a landslide.
The Democrats didn't lose because Harris didn't get a primary. Literally no one but Republicans who would never have voted for her to begin with cared about that.
Democrats lost because they keep triangulating and trying to appeal to centrist Republicans who either don't exist, or would never vote for them regardless. If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide - which was the single issue much of her base cared about - she would have won.
Also, Trump didn't win in a landslide. It was a close election, and Trump definitely won the popular vote, but the margins were still about 51% to 49%.
>Democrats lost because they keep triangulating and trying to appeal to centrist Republicans who either don't exist, or would never vote for them regardless. If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide - which was the single issue much of her base cared about - she would have won.
Everyone thinks that their one particular issue was the crucial one, but all the data shows that the issues that actually mattered were A) inflation and B) the border / immigration / crime / perception of disorder.
The only two Dem Senators that underperformed Harris were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The rest of the downballot had been running hard centrist on the border for much longer and with less baggage, and guess what, they did better.
> Democrats didn't lose because Harris didn't get a primary
The point is Harris would have been replaced in a primary. Democrats needed a candidate who could call Biden out on his failures, namely, not taking inflation seriously (Manchin said so!) and completely flubbing it on the border.
> If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide
She would have lost worse in Pennsylvania and maybe picked up Michigan and had absolutely zero effect anywhere else because foreign policy wasn’t a material factor in this election. (It was a loud factor. But not in an electorally relevant way.)
I get the impulse to do this. My pet war was Ukraine. But neither was actually voted on because Americans don’t tend to think about foreign policy unless we’re actually at (or about to go to) war ourselves.
The world realizes the USA is no longer messing around, that's all. If anything, we've only gained prestige in the last couple months, we're finally getting stuff done...
Hmm? That is a rather bold statement bordering on bluster. Could you elaborate? The move shows something, but I am not certain it can be interpreted this way.
Yes, that's precisely the argument of the pro-ban faction. China doesn't allow TikTok in China. It's not about the money, it's about control over a medium that can be exploited for influence, or at the very least the effects of that platform on its audience.
It's silly to pretend like ByteDance are acting on principle. Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
Sure, but parent's argument was focused on ad revenue and wondering why TikTok chose to forego that revenue ( which presumed that most US entities would bend to such demand, but failed to consider non financial considerations ).
edit:
<< Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
China does not pretend to give lipservice to freedom of speech. US does. That is why its population needs to hold its government accountable.
Sounds like we have our answer. Have China flood the internet with "content". American scrapers train on it. Now we can ban LLM use on American websites, compromised by China!
I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.
And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.
So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?
Exactly, Americans want to voice their opinions whenever a foreign country considers banning or regulating an American social media platform. It's a clear double standard. The U.S. government banning foreign companies is fine, but when a foreign country bans an American company, it’s called censorship or something like that?
But the US is a foreign adversary of the EU who has ruined the EU economy in the last three years and wants to wrestle away Greenland.
Half joking, but the US performs corporate espionage in the EU and certainly takes compromising material on EU politicians whenever it can get it.
The slavish adherence from EU NPC politicians (they are mediocre and no one knows how they manage to rise) to US directives has to have some reasons. Being compromised is one of those.
EU governments also spy in the US. Any government that isn't spying on their enemies and allies both is incompetent.
The reason that the EU "adheres to US directives" is mostly just a legacy of WWII and the Cold War, you don't really have to posit any kind of nefarious espionage scheme to explain why European countries want to stay connected to the US economy and military.
Until we ban Denmark as an "adversary" because they won't just hand over Greenland. Or Mexico for setting tarrifs against us (because we declared tarrifs first).
Yup I'd be ok with banning TikTok because all of the US web services that are banned China, but this makes it seem like every country should have their own everything
Officials at the EU should first wonder why there is no European equivalent of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Tiktok (the list could continue forever).
Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.
No matter what you think of this ban, the court is obviously not the right place to solve it. It is completely unsurprising that this is a unanimous decision because foreign trade is one of the few powers expressly given to the federal government in the constitution:
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]
(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)
America has the right to ban since china banned all American tech companies from operating in their nation but this means America could never ever talk about freedom of doing business bs
China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.
If you're comparing outsourcing, mutual trade agreements that benefit both countries, to intelligence gathering, copyright/patent theft, media influence, etc., you're probably not going to arrive at a serious position here (not to mention the downvote).
Answering tit-for-tat is fine, even if the thing being done is bad in itself (e.g. waging war is bad, but should a country not use weapons to defend itself when invaded?). If else US and in general the West should have acted earlier: if American companies where free to operate in China and influence its people I doubt this ban would have been enacted.
Any country has the right to this kind of ban, that's what national sovereignty is all about.
A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.
And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...
Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.
Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.
So they were right about banning the US social media platforms then, right? Because according to this court opinion, having foreign social media is a menace to national security. It's funny to see Americans argue for a great firewall lol.
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
We don't know that the secret evidence was that TT doesn't promote U.S. propaganda. We can surmise, but speculation can be wrong. Besides, the justices might simply have revealed that secret evidence, had it really been just that. But they claim they didn't even consider the secret evidence. Unclear whether they took a peek, but they say they didn't consider it.
An implementation detail that might be interesting is that the discussed method of the ban is to use the same ISP block that is used for torrent sites (and other websites).
This may be a bit of relevance when talking about how banning a website get applied through the legal system.
That’s a good point. Apparently VPN popularity is already exploding in states that PornHub had to block.
Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).
2,730 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 709 ms ] threadPeople who for decades subscribed to the notion that "emanations from penumbras" are a source of constitutional law don't have any room to talk about judicial activism.
It started with the Marshall Court and never stopped.
Prosaically, what individual or group is being declared guilty here? The law requires TikTok to have new ownership; it doesn’t seize it, or set a price for it, which might therefore harm shareholders. Calling this attainder seems like a pretty big stretch to me. And, it seems Bytedance legal counsel didn’t think this would fly as well.
The difference here is that Tik Tok is not being accused of a crime and is not being punished for some crime. It's applying a restriction on foreign ownership not to punish Tik Tok for some past act, but because Congress is worried about the risks arising from that ownership in the future.
> However, the Court has emphasized that legislation does not violate the Bill of Attainder Clause simply because it places legal burdens on a specific individual or group.2 Rather, as discussed in more detail below, a bill of attainder must also inflict punishment.
Divestment isn't a punishment for a crime. Nobody is accusing Tik Tok of having committed a crime. Congress simply doesn't want a foreign power hostile to the U.S. to control a business that's popular in the U.S.
-----
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
-----
The way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.
I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
I mean, that's true of basically all administrative agencies.
The definition of "foreign adversary controlled application" in the bill is explicit in including either (a) this specific list of organizations, OR (b) other organization that might meet certain criteria later. I'm not sure how the existence of (b) addresses the concern that (a) amounts to a bill of attainder.
To me this bill seems problematic on that front in two directions. One is that it explicitly names a target of the ban. Secondly, it grants the president power to arbitrarily name more. Similar to how a King can declare certain Subjects be Attainded on His Whim.
But the petitioners (TikTok) did not raise this issue so the court did not have to decide on it. Instead they focused on the first amendment issue, which seems like a loser -- there is no speech present on TikTok that the law bans; any content on TikTok can be posted to red-blooded American apps like shorts or reels so the speech itself is not affected.
Approximately 50% of rulings are unanimous each year now. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/supreme-court-unan...
In the past, it was even more so.
Don't get me wrong, I consumed American media and played American video games before I understood English, so clicking around eventually led you down some path.
But isn't most of that content meant to be consumed by people who understand the language said content is made with?
It's to spite the United States Government. And it's hilarious.
https://social.coop/@eb/113829092915144918
The posts are largely subtitled in both Chinese and English regardless of the spoken language. Comments are often in both languages, but if not you can click Translate.
It's known to use facial recognition to boost videos of "beautiful people".
https://www.dexerto.com/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-prioritizes...
I'd still be surprised, but less so, I'd auto insurance adjusters are taking the time to make short form content aimed at the 40+ audience.
- Law by Mike (10M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/meJA30cglvo
- Legal Eagle (3.5M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lgT4iZ9BYF8
- Ugo Lord (1.9M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I77J6n72Oto
- Attorney Tom (500k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kgLTqx2UFUk
- Mike Rafi (300k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/znQgK6God2w
- CEO Lawyer (24k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RzqBiKLZNy4
Law by Mike puts some pretty incredible production value into their videos.
Sharing YouTube links because TikTok web isn't great and the links will likely stop working in a few days.
Can't say I have insurance adjusters on my FYP, but I think that speaks to the power of the algorithm's targeting far more than it does the lack of content.
- Mao's Red Book, and
- the BLM/metoo/woke thing in the 2020s?
There's gotta be a joke in there about the communists selling the capitalists the rope the capitalists eventually hang themselves with. But, I digress.
Using Chinese social media is cool now.
Fortunately, I think you're wrong about this. American children will be saying mandarin catchphrases before they start using Instagram Reels.
And yes, this begs the question of "when does something become a matter of national security". 10 million? A million moving over before the day of reckoning isn't a small thing.
Tiktok algo is nothing special: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg...
The volume of interaction data from good interface design and huge user base is the core of the success.
What makes you think the Bytedance chefs who cooked the sauce wont join the Redbook company? Their HQ were both located in China anyway.
On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.
But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.
Culture thrives when the people are able to live meaningful lives.
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
I agree. And the bribery already started when the Trump campaign found itself doing very well on engagement in TikTok. The CCP had already started the bribery before the election in a bid to maintain influence over the US while halting American influence in China.
The Biden administration I believe said they won't enforce the law starting Sunday, leaving it to the incoming administration to enforce. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok, so I expect he'll do it without forcing a sale.
Good question actually.
Does that mean "If foreign companies don't like our laws, they can pay to have them adjusted"? Seems not very faithful, but I hardly understand that word anymore it feels like.
Apparently, committing crimes with absolute immunity is a necessary part of the presidential office. Without such protections, they'd be afraid to do things like extrajudicial drone strikes (Obama) and internment camps (FDR). Oh, wait.
I hate to "Poe's Law" this tangent, but most people forget that Hitler's rise to power was also completely legal. Just change the constitution and get the judiciary to side with you, and you can do anything. It's terrifying.
Does the US have a different definition for everything?
The selective enforcement of laws is a hot button issue and both sides accuse the other of doing it. (Both sides do it all the time).
As far as I know, every country has similar issues. I constantly see articles where people are allegedly being prosecuted because they are on the opposite side of the government leadership while also seeing articles claiming they let their own side off.
GP comment changed significantly (for the better).
News story from yesterday, "TikTok CEO expected to attend Trump inauguration as ban looms":
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/...
"A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings" https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/bannon-second-trump...
A couple of Trump forums focus on distractions like the California fires and delete comments about working class rights. The same forums that were full of workers' rights just until before the election.
Breitbart has nothing on immigration and displacement of US workers. It celebrates the (alleged, Trump claims a lot) phone call between Trump and Xi.
So unless the MAGA crowd goes to the capitol to protest against Trump this time, you won't hear anything anywhere.
And this ultimately puts it in a place where you have to assume that it will be enforced against you. Right?
The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.
What is the point of freedom of speech and freedom of press when we can just shut down any apps not touting the mono-party lines?
people in the us finally found a real public square to talk, and it is being shut down against the spirit of everything the US purports to stand for.
I agree with you, and wouldn't agree with a TikTok ban either if it affected me.
But how does that change anything about what I wrote?
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
Edited for word choice.
Fake news.
Chinese users are starting to caption their videos in English. American users are posting regularly.
It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.
Look up the playstore and you will see. Download it for yourself and you will see.
Meanwhile, YouTube’s user numbers in the U.S. are estimated at 240 million, but it’s unlikely to gain many new downloads since almost everyone already has the app.
In my view, it’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
But it illustrates the general dissatisfaction among TikTok users with the other mainstream US social content platforms.
700k in how much time? RN tops the (Play Store) charts here (EU/Croatia) as well, and anecdotally there's a lot of word of mouth growth. Even though TikTok will not get banned over here.
> It’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
Possibly, but it does have a foot in the door. It doesn't look like they were ready for western audience so remains to be seen if they can seize on the opportunity.
Let's say this portion is around 60% of Tiktok users. So something like 60-70million and window span is 10 days. They need to sustain 6-7 million new US users per day in order to make a successful transition.
This is like the Mastodon spike when Elon bought Twitter. It doesn't mean anything.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
The interesting aspect here is rather the magnitude of dissatisfaction that a large percentage of users feel towards the other mainstream US social content platforms.
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.
…same as TikTok. Removed from app stores.
In the way that Gorsuch wrote a separate concurrence, I expected Alito or Thomas to want to broadcast a particular message to their audience.
But don't worry either way. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok and he does really well on the platform so it'll be saved.
What I shed a tear for is slow decline of US and its founding principles, because George Carlin clearly was right. Even if you barely pay attention, the list your your temporary privileges is slowly getting shorter.
edit: Even the fact that I have to explain it at such a basic level is tremendously sad.
Instead, we've passed a law through Congress to restrict a foreign business from operating in the United States. We do this all the time, and have from the start of our history. Such actions were supported by the founders and are legally consistent. Just because TikTok allows people to share memes better doesn't make it a free speech platform. It's just some company and we can choose to allow it to operate here or not as a society.
That is some mighty slippery slope you are on friend. You sure you are ok with this one company being singled out and exceptions slowly applied to the first amendment? Make no mistake. This, at best, is just a temporary pitstop, because, as time progresses, more and more will chosen to be 'disfavored'/'disallowed' ( I have no way of knowing what euphemism will be used to describe it ) to operate in society. Should be fun.
<< If we were talking about banning all social media, I think you'd be able to make a stronger 1st Amendment case.
We are talking about TikTok, but I am arguing that singling one company out effectively undermines 1st amendment. You may be right about strengthtening the case. I am not able to properly judge that.
<< Instead, we've passed a law through Congress to restrict a foreign business from operating in the United States.
Sure, but the restriction does not seem to apply to other market contestants. Meta and MS do the same things ( but for US ) and yet do not seem to be penalized.
<< Just because TikTok allows people to share memes better doesn't make it a free speech platform.
Just because you consider it a useless meme, does not make it not speech. There is a reason why the saying goes 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.
We give and take permission from foreign companies to operate here all the time and it's not a conflict with our Constitution.
Let's take American sanctions, for example.
Are you going to argue that Russia's Gazprom's right to free speech is stifled too? Or do they just have to create a Gazprom social media app so they can become a free speech platform and now "sorry 1st Amendment can't do anything"? Can Iran open up an office in San Francisco and create an app and share a few videos and then share tips for making bombs and encourage Americans to not take vaccines and not send their kids to school and to eat laundry detergent pods?
This doesn't justify one way or the other any other tech company's behavior, but if they are an American company owned by Americans the rules always have been and always will be different (as they should be).
> Make no mistake. This, at best, is just a temporary pitstop, because, as time progresses, more and more will chosen to be 'disfavored'/'disallowed' ( I have no way of knowing what euphemism will be used to describe it ) to operate in society. Should be fun.
We can just ban any foreign owned social media company from operating in the United States. But I don't think you are wrong. Americans (and people around the globe) are extremely addicted to social media and whether that's Meta or TikTok they'll find a way to feed that addiction even as it damages their mind. I think it would be good to ban all social media across the globe. We'd all be more free and better off for it.
I am in a pickle, because I do not think I can comment on those hypotheticals without going down a deep rabbit hole. Fwiw, sanctions is not a bad counter-argument regardless of my biased view of those.
<< Are you going to argue that Russia's Gazprom's right to free speech is stifled too?
Hardly an issue given that they do not operate in space that publishes American's thoughts.
<< Or do they just have to create a Gazprom social media app so they can become a free speech platform and now "sorry 1st Amendment can't do anything"? Can Iran open up an office in San Francisco and create an app and share a few videos and then share tips for making bombs and encourage Americans to not take vaccines and not send their kids to school and to eat laundry detergent pods?
Now those are good questions, but how are those videos that different than what can be found on 4chan daily? Apart from everything else, it makes source easier to identify..
<< This doesn't justify one way or the other any other tech company's behavior, but if they are an American company owned by Americans the rules always have been and always will be different (as they should be).
Hard disagree, but I accept that this is where we both can be reasonably at odds. I accept there are pragmatic benefits to your approach.
<< We can just ban any foreign owned social media company from operating in the United States.
I mean yes, clearly based on the fact that TikTok was just banned.
<< Americans (and people around the globe) are extremely addicted to social media and whether that's Meta or TikTok they'll find a way to feed that addiction even as it damages their mind.
I think you are right about the addiction, but I am not sure if you are right about the action taken as a result of that addiction.
<< I think it would be good to ban all social media across the globe. We'd all be more free and better off for it.
Here we are aligned.
***********
Thank you for this exchange. It is why I come to HN. I have a long day ahead so I might not be able to respond more timely from this point forward today.
Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; . . .
This is foreign commerce. It falls under the explicit jurisdiction of Congress.
However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.
Yeah, it's the perhaps most powerful clause in the constitution. A large number of laws are formed like "[actual law ...] in commerce." That is the hook needed for a lot of laws to be constitutional. Technically those laws only apply to interstate or international commerce.
There are even supreme court cases discussing this:
>Congress uses different modifiers to the word “commerce” in the design and enactment of its statutes. The phrase “affecting commerce” indicates Congress’ intent to regulate to the outer limits of its authority under the Commerce Clause. [...] Considering the usual meaning of the word “involving,” and the pro-arbitration purposes of the FAA, Allied-Bruce held the “word ‘involving,’ like ‘affecting,’ signals an intent to exercise Congress’ commerce power to the full.” Ibid. Unlike those phrases, however, the general words “in commerce” and the specific phrase “engaged in commerce” are understood to have a more limited reach. In Allied-Bruce itself the Court said the words “in commerce” are “oftenfound words of art” [...] The Court’s reluctance to accept contentions that Congress used the words “in commerce” or “engaged in commerce” to regulate to the full extent of its commerce power rests on sound foundation, as it affords objective and consistent significance to the meaning of the words Congress uses when it defines the reach of a statute.[0]
[0] Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105 (2001) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/532/105/case.pdf
Only because the Court wants it to be, so they can play Calvinball.
Marijuana grown, sold, and consumed entirely within one state? Still interstate commerce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
To act as a catch all override clause to allow for federal intervention anywhere really important.
It's worth noting that many conservative lawyers and activists have been calling for a more limited interpretation of interstate commerce, as a way of shifting power away from Congress to individual states.
I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.
Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.
> Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.
Further more, "Corporations are people" implying corporations have rights isn't related to corporate personhood and is based on a (often deliberate by opposing politicians) misinterpretation of the phrase, as spoken by Mitt Romney.
What Romney was saying and what is true when he said "Corporations are people" is confusing because people interpret it as "Corporations are persons" which is not what he, or the case law he was referring to implied. The singular of the phrase is much more clear, a corporation is people.
The whole case was about a group of people pooling their funds to make a movie about Hilary Clinton being bad and the court found that the people still had free speech rights when acting through a corporation to pool their funds and so political donation limits didn't apply as long as no political campaign was involved. Hence, Super PACs having to say that the campaigns their supporting aren't involved with the campaigns.
It's actually an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation and the decision is equally so.
You can’t marry a child or your cousin (in most states), that doesn’t mean they aren’t people.
See https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1787288209963290753
Isn't that obviously foreign commerce?
>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.
That might be technically true, but if (1) you're the lawyer representing a party in an important case, (2) you've already appealed that case up to the highest appelate court and lost, and (3) you think there's any chance that the Supreme Court might change the ruling in your favor, then wouldn't it basically be professional malpractice to not petition for certiorari? Of course, they only accept a tiny percentage of the petitions they receive.
Because obviously changing the owner-editor of a media outlet has everything to do with their editorial policy. The SCOTUS just said that censorship is ok (and forcing the change of the editor is censorship, there is no doubt about it), as long as it's against another state's editorial preferences potentially having a significant audience in the country.
It obviously doesn't. That would mean the US Government can ban all foreign press, just by designating countries as "foreign adversaries". And "foreign adversaries" is a euphemism for "countries that don't submit". The SCOTUS just invented another exception to the absolutist interpretation.
>wholly uncontroversial indictments of the owners of Tenet Media
>were charged with failing to register as a foreign agent
This entire narrative together with the banning of Tiktok is wholly hypocritical, given the American media, tech, and NGO's influence/dominance around the world.
The moment someone achieved what the American entities have been doing around the world, the non-stop wailing of "foreign adversaries this, foreign adversaries that" started.
Meanwhile in Georgia, a country bordering Russia, the law requiring foreign-financed NGOs to register was declared to "stigmatize organizations that serve the citizens of Georgia" with accompanying travel bans for the authoritarian evil doers who passed said law by the US state department.
>Petitioners argue that such a ban will burden various First Amendment activities, including content moderation, content generation, access to a distinct medium for expression, association with another speaker or preferred editor, and receipt of information and ideas.
Sotomayor expands on this in her concurrence:
>TikTok engages in expressive activity by “compiling and curating” material on its platform. Laws that “impose a disproportionate burden” upon those engaged in expressive activity are subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment. The challenged Act plainly imposes such a burden: It bars any entity from distributing TikTok’s speech in the United States, unless TikTok undergoes a qualified divestiture. The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.”
SCOTUS didn't have much to work with aside from level of scrutiny. They defer to Congress regarding national security.
For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.
China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.
I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.
Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
I guess civil law gives you less room to explore ideas like "living" statutes and laws that gain and change meaning over time; if there was such a change, you'd write it down?
Regardless: whether you're a textualist or realist, in the US you're still operating in a common law system.
> What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws.
They were making a direct comparison between "textualism" and civil law, but didn't include the terms. I found the comparison interesting and thought I'd make it easier for anyone else who was confused by OP's comparison.
I realize on re-reading that this comparison is much less prominent than I thought it was in OP's comment, so it makes sense that my links would seem out of place. An explicit quote of that sentence would have helped.
Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Lmao these people are rubes. It's like every other bs "national security" argument.
Expect Yandex, VK, RT, Sputnik, SCMP, etc. to be banned as well under similar pretenses.
"Comrades! We can not let these Western dogs infect our proud Soviet minds with this 'Radio Free Europe'!"
> Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
It's not an erosion because it was already true and has been true for centuries.
Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.
I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.
But China is a bit different in that they don't simply have the authority to request data, they have the authority to direct management of the company.
Regardless, "someone associated with the government got a job at your company" is entirely different in consequence than "the government requires you to have government interests on your board"
I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.
For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.
Isn't the inquiry made MORE subjective by incorporating extratextual considerations?
Or do you just mean that textualism is oversold, and delivers less than it advertises?
First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.
TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.
Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.
Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.
Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.
Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
They released a Marty Rimm-level report citing that pro-Palestinian was mentioned more than pro-Israeli content in ratios that differed from Meta products. This was the 'smoking gun' of manipulation when it's more of a sign Meta was the one doing the manipulation.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/6/7/china-spied-on-ho...
Every major social media and dating application has a law enforcement portal. This was documented in BlueLeaks.
https://archive.ph/kt0fY
But, this is done under the guise of commercial interests, usually advertising, so it's okay?
I’d argue the TikTok remedy should be applied to X, too.
Companies in China (and especially those of prominence) have formal structures and regulations that require them to cooperate with the government, and sometimes require the companies to allow the government to intervene in operations if necessary.
It is not possible for a CCP official to show up to a board meeting at X and direct the company to take some action, because that isn't how US corporations work.
But regardless, there is a huge difference between a request and actually having managerial authority -- the most obvious being that someone with managerial authority can simply do whatever they want without trying to compel someone else. Also, X, being subject to US law, must comply with that no matter what consequences Musk is threatened with. So, any threats may have limits in what they can practically accomplish.
The only problem with democracy is that it's so fragile and susceptible to bad non-democrat actors intervention, which is more of an awareness problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:
https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...
Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...
I'm not sure they do that anymore, not in the current geopolitical climate and not with the DC ghouls having taken over the most sensitive parts of Meta the company (there were many posts on this web-forum about former CIA people and not only working at the highest levels inside of Meta).
They can claim this is not a sale if they want, but it’s still a sale. Drug dealers make similar arguments about similar shell games where you hand a random dude some cash, then later some other random dude drops a bag on the ground and you pick it up.
Since Facebook was first caught doing this during the Obama administration, it’s hard to argue they are not intentionally selling the data at this point.
I’m not anti-vax. I’ve been shot up with Covid vaccines more often than I can count and I was early in line for the J and J one shot and I took an mRNA booster before it was recommended by the US once I started reading it was recommended by other country’s health departments.
But where we are now is totally the fault of Biden and the Democratic establishment.
My interpretation of the parent’s comment is that we have pretty serious (and dubiously legal) overreach on this in a purely domestic setting as well.
As someone who has worked a lot on products very much like TikTok, I’d certainly argue that we do.
There is an adjacent point that many of us feel is just as important, which is that there is evidence in the public record (see Snowden disclosures among others) that there is lawbreaking or at least abuse of clearly stated constitutional liberties taking place domestically in the consumer internet space and has been for a long time.
Both things can be true, and both are squarely on topic for this debate whether on HN or in the Senate Chambers.
American culture has been such an influencing force on the world due to our conduits, movies and music. TikTok is a Chinese conduit, and I do believe this is happening. Our culture can be co-opted, the Chinese had John Cena apologize to ALL of China. They can easily pay to have American influencers spin in a certain way, influencing everything.
As an aside, TikTok itself is banned in China.
No idea if this applies to companies, but foreign visitors do get protections.
Minor clarification that some parts specify "citizen" (e.g. voting). Others specify "person" or "resident" or the like, which would be anyone within the border.
You will not find anywhere in the text that limits this to citizenship (with the sparse examples of the concept of citizenship coming up being things like eligibility for presidential office). The purpose of the Constitution is to spell out the abilities of the government, and one of the things it is expressly forbidden from doing is passing laws that curtail peoples' ability to communicate or associate.
This amendment to the constitution was rewritten a few times, each time more clearly stating that it applies to “the people”.
From: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-1/ALD...
This is a very weakly held opinion, and I don’t know if the opinion addresses this.
All of the congressional hearings over the past ~15 years demonstrates how business in the US is still pretty much governed by the rule of law. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t some shadow cabal working with Musk and Zuckerberg to control our minds. However we know that the CCP absolutely manages what the public can consume, so personally while I’m no fan of heavy handed government intervention in business, this ban seems like “a good thing” to me. We must protect the short, middle and long term prospects of our population — it’s a fundamental duty of the federal government to do so.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/google-faceboo...
If they want speech, they should reside in the US, not just own a piece of a company that does.
The rights enforced inside the US are very generous compared to most countries and many apply to both legal and illegal residents, but restricting some rights, especially political ones, is crucial to have a sovereign state
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Because people are writing Orwell fanfiction?
ByteDance is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
What facebook and ByteDance want at their core are very different things.
More dangerous to the US government? Yes, that's true.
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.
What is the list? Does WWII count as one war, or do we could belligerents individually?
Ironically, the "good" guys here allow you to talk shit on the internet about them while the "bad" guys would catch and harvest my organs someday for writing this comment.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_... [1] https://chinatribunal.com/ [2] https://theowp.org/reports/china-is-forcibly-harvesting-orga...
And funnily enough, just had a state try to pass a law making prisoners get to "choose" to donate organs for a reduced sentence https://apnews.com/article/organ-donation-massachusetts-stat...
But point is, no love for the CCP but this sort of jingoistic take sucks. China is not "literally hell"
Major social media apps? Chinese apps are still in our app stores, just not TikTok (as of Sunday).
Edit: related https://hate.tg/
There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).
If it wasn't ratified by the senate then we didn't enter into a treaty, I really don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
Let them collect and ban this. Difference between Meta and TikTok is you can prosecute the former’s top leadership.
As if this would get banned.
This banning of TikTok because of "national security" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Might the next application banned on these ground be domestic? It's unsettling, in my opinion, to see this precedent set.
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
I wonder how do you know "the interests of the majority of people" is to ban Tiktok...
The interest of the people is to have a peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, while the interest of the military-industrial complex is to keep the tension high at all times so that more and more money is spent on armaments.
Who do you think the US government will favor in the end?
Who has more power to determine the result of the next elections, considering that to run a presidential campaign you need more than a billion dollars?
No citizen gains from war except the few that sell weapons and want to exploit other countries.
Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of
It's not about convincing them to want it but rather about sowing doubt and confusion at the critical moment.
David French's NYT column last week starts with what one might call a "just-plausible-enough" scenario: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/opinion/tiktok-supreme-co... (gift link, yw).
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
tiktok.com links were available in China.
Obviously the USA doesn't have a GFW, so they can't actually block tiktok, just ban it from the app store and prevent business from resolving in the US around it (e.g. paying content creators).
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
China blocks facebook/twitter/instagram/pinterest/gmail/wikipedia/twitch and even US newspapers.
So clearly they don't think it's okay for a US-company to do it (and are at least an order magnitude stricter about it)...
Edit:
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
America is ridiculously pro free speech. That doesn’t mean we must then tolerate libel, slander, fraud, false advertising, breach of contract, et cetera because someone screams free speech.
The Bill of Rights exists in balances, and the First Amendment is balanced, among other the things, with the nation’s requirement to exist. That doesn’t mean the Congress can ban speech. But it can certainly regulate media properties, including by mandating maximum foreign ownership fractions.
Except for one group of people which have made any criticism of them carry legal consequences
Jews? You know we have other federally-protected classes, correct?
If you’re referring to Israel, no, there aren’t legal consequences for criticising Israel. Half of the vocal minority of the internet is constantly up in arms about Israel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_China
The Chinese constitution, in addition to endowing rights, also endows obligations.
So while you have things like: > Article 35 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
You also have things like: > Article 54 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland’s security, honor or interests.
Compare this to the Supreme court, which is supposedly in Trump's hands, ruling against Trump twice on this tiktok ban alone (the first to kill his executive order, and the second to not pause the law to wait for him to take office).
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
Twitter and Meta are foreign everywhere else, everywhere else except China TikTok is foreign as well and apparently they all lick their respective governments.
I don't see how this law banning a social media site brings us at all closer to a world where Americans cannot get access to accurate information about major global conflicts. This is so far down the imagined "slippery slope" as to be absurd. In fact, I'd strongly argue that this law would achieve the opposite. If you're relying on Tik Tok for accurate information like this, then you are opening yourself to echo chambers, biased takes, and outright propaganda. There are many excellent sources out there in America freely available and easily accessible.
Remember how Musk decided that after the elections Twitter will prioritize fun instagram of politics?
I fail to see how anything going on at Twitter is relevant to what I mentioned. Does Twitter shifting its content priorities somehow make the plethora of excellence sources unavailable?
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
Chinese courts are explicitly subservient to the party.
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
FTA
They do, and they did. From the ruling:
The Act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adver- sary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This ob- jective qualifies as an important Government interest un- der intermediate scrutiny.
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
They are and have been.
If China could effectively influence the American populations opinions, how would that not be bad?
Do you prefer Americans to be ignorant about certain topics, or to be informed even if that comes at the cost of reduced approval for the government?
That trust wasn't lost because of foreign propaganda, but because of the government own lies.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
In a way, this thread could very well be monitored and commented on by a non US nation state
In the context of a discussion on a US-specific ban on TikTok I'm taking the "us" in OP's post to mean people in the US. If you aren't in the US the ban doesn't apply to you so the discussion is irrelevant.
[1]: https://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator....
[2]: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com
International Steam is also banned in China yet we curiously see the majority of users nowadays use simplified Chinese.
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
You don't have to agree that protecting those interests is worth the disruption to the global market, free speech ideology, etc. But to engage in the debate, you need to recognize that this is the core concern.
I share the exact same concern about "deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment" from US-based corporations running algorithmically-generated designed to addict consumers, and also believe that everyone needs to recognize that core concern as well.
ALL of it needs to die.
You mean letting U.S. citizens see the flour massacre video on a platform where the security state can’t ban it.
This bill languished for years until that happened.
You have an interesting and unique definition of "state censorship". Almost like one defined by a bias inherently interested in letting specific foreign interests continue to proliferate under the guise of an emotional appeal.
The influence is what law makers care far more about. Remember what Russia was doing on facebook in 2016? Now imagine that Russia actually owned facebook at the time.
Right, and silver is better than nothing.
I think many of us on HN would agree that US social media companies having the means to manipulate user sentiment via private algorithms is a bad thing. But it's at least marginally better than a foreign adversary doing so because US companies have a base interest in the US continuing to be a functional country. Plus it's considerably more difficult to pass a law covering this domestically, where US tech giants have vested interests, lobbyists and voters they can manipulate.
So yes, a targeted ban against a foreign-owned company isn't the ideal outcome. But it's not difficult to see why it's considered a better outcome than doing nothing at all.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_warfare
C'mon, we can have a more informed conversation than that.
TikTok is an entertainment platform the average young American watches for more than an hour a day. Videos cover just about any topic imaginable. We just had an election. Is it really so impossible to imagine a foreign power adjusting the algorithm to show content favorable to one candidate over another? It's entirely within their power and they have every motive.
The TikTok ban would have been the perfect opportunity for any number of competing US social media apps to swoop in and offer TT's current users a replacement, but they seem to have all failed to address that market.
Just at a base level, Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are, though it's very unlikely, arrestable. Can't say the same for TikTok.
I suspect this is our fundamental disagreement. I disagree with both of these statements. Facebook's & X's executives have a vested interested in power and money for themselves and their peers. These oligarchs are in practice above the law, just like China's and Russia's oligarchs are. This decision only gives them even more control. It's bad for those US citizens who are not in the oligarch class.
Put another way, I think China & Facebook's execs are about equal in terms of danger to US citizens (I'd probably give the edge to Facebook's execs, since they have direct control over US policy, but we're splitting hairs here). So banning one but not the other is a crappy situation, because it concentrates that power even further.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...
Sally stole a cookie from the cookie jar and now the teacher is pointing at the fat kid and not letting him be in the classroom alone with the cookie jar. Just bc he is fat.
Sure they haven't:
https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-far-right-european-pa...
Facebook deserves more scrutiny, that doesn't forgive or waive TikTok's issues. It's a bad faith deflection.
“Parliament and other institutions as well as national governments issued restrictions on its use in 2023 over fears of Beijing’s access to the data”
Thanks for wasting my fucking time reading your bullshit links.
The US is happy to invade countries and turns a blind eye to Israeli aggression but Russia or China want to do it and they are met with sanctions etc. The last bastion of American exceptionalism was how it’s a free market and values free speech and free competition.
There was a national security threat but the US walked right into it: China is making a move for the top spot as global hegemon. It’s recruiting other countries to say don’t work with the US, work with us instead. The US flinched. Ralph blew the conch and all the kids just installed RedNote .
If I understand correctly how it works, it’s a propagandist’s dream, building personalized psych profiles on each person. You could imagine that it’d be the perfect place to try generating novel videos to fit specific purposes, as well - the signals from this could feed back directly into the loss functions for the generative models.
I think politicians’ efforts to regulate tech are generally not great, but I think this one is pretty spot-on.
The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
However, there is another law that made sale of data to foreign adversaries illegal, passed in April 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
Nothing but lazy disingenuous arguments who's only purpose is to bait conversations for replying with even lazier whataboutisms.
Either the brainrot has really set in for these people or we are being flooded with ai/bots.
(a) American companies’ business interests don’t fully align with the needs of their users or the general public,
and that
(b) the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives —which include weakening, destabilizing, and impoverishing the United States— are even less aligned with the interests of American citizens.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
If they aren't already prosecuting him on this I guess technically it's legal but such a weird loophole in the law. Any spending towards promoting a candidate should be public knowledge imo. EDIT: he was claiming bullshit like GOD chose him and that's how he got that good of a result. I guess his God is the people in the shadows that made his tiktok campaign lol
> For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls
I think they did it for many reasons but not because he didn't show up in polls.
Top ones are:
- PSD didn't advance in the second round and they had the leverage to pull it off
- Georgescu was clearly anti-NATO so maybe the US pulled strings
- Danger of having a president with Russian sympathies
- He was claiming that he didn't spend a single dime on the election while everyone in the know knows that his tiktok campaign cost sever million euros
Out of the fourth reasons you list at the end, only the fourth is not pure authoritarianism (why wouldn't people in a democracy be free to elect a president that dislikes NATO or likes Russia if that is their will?). Campaign funding fraud has happened in many Western countries but typically it's handling by imposing fines, maybe some jail time, but definitely not cancelling the result of an entire election.
And considering the level of education of most of the Romanian population I believe having "true" democracy would destroy the country. I understand this may not be a popular opinion but I'm trying to be realistic here lol
I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.
• US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).
• Chinese companies can buy US companies (thereby obtaining lots of data).
If we killed user-tracking, then that would solve a LOT of problems.
This is false. It was made illegal in April, 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
This is very limited and will not prevent indirect sales (like we now see happening with Russian oil for example).
It is also why I said "indirectly".
Keeping the data securely inside our country is never going to work if China can simply open their wallet and spend billions of $ to obtain the data.
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Everybody forgot already US spying on Merkel's phone?
But that's okay, because America is not bound to any rules I guess. Disgusting foreign policy with a disgusting exceptionalism mentality.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
We know most of it because of whistleblower leaks.
No free press, no whistleblowers.
Just because something has been repeated in the news 20000 times, it doesn't make it true without evidence. Speculation is just it: speculation.
As far as I've seen, it's not Chinese company spying on me, it's US ones, it's not Chinese companies hacking Wifis in all major airports to track regular citizens, it's US ones, it's not Chinese intelligence spying on European politicians, it's US ones, it's not Chinese diplomacy drawing the line between rebels/protesters, good or bad geopolitically, it's always Washington, it's not Chinese intelligence we know of hacking major European infrastructure and bypassing SCADA, it's US one.
The elephant in the room is US' fixation for exceptionalism and being self authorized to do whatever it pleases while at the same time making up geopolitical enemies and forcing everybody to follow.
I don't buy it, I'm sorry. I don't particularly like the Chinese system, I don't particularly love their censorship, and I don't particularly like their socials on our ground when our ones are unable to operate there (unless they abide to Chinese laws, which are restricting and demand user data non stop, something they are very willing to do in US though).
My beef is with American's exceptionalism and with the average American Joe who cannot see the dangers posed by the foreign policy of its own country. The US should set the example and then pretend the same, instead it does worse than everybody and cries that only it can. It's dangerous.
Yes there has been. TikTok admitted to it. They were tracking journalists.
This is not a mere accusation. Instead the company admitted to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
So I read it like they didn't interpret this as a free speech issue at all.
1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
I disagree; and it's the dismissal for the past 13-14 years of China as an immediate threat which is what has in part allowed China to become such a large longer-term threat.
> They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer
I would put it differently: China wants its own global hegemony instead of the U.S.' -- and that's understandable (everyone wants to rule the world). But if the U.S. doesn't want that to happen then it has to take steps to counter it.
That's the exact reason why Communist China setup the firewall in the first place. Good luck.
The GFW doesn't just block websites/networks/content that is controlled by adversarial foreign governments, but all websites/networks/content which the CCP is unable to censor. The GFW is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the CCP's control.
Am I rephrasing this correctly?
Yandex got fragmented into EU bits and Russian bits. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...
The head of VK is subject to sanctions https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus... (but it appears that Americans are still free to use VK if they want to?)
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary.
As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
The problem in China is that there weren't strong safeguards to prevent a totalitarian control (CCP is supposed to be democratic within itself in that leaders are elected, though it's all restricted to party members, of course), and when Xi came into power he was able, within a few years, to sweep aside all opposition, primarily through "anti-corruption campaigns". So he now has a degree of control and power that would be a wet dream for Trump. (And you should see the level of adulation in the newspapers there.)
Now in the US we have a separate problem, and that is we have a system where unelected people like Elon and Zuckerberg, Murdoch, etc., exercise a tremendous amount of influence over the population through their policies and who are pursuing a marriage between authoritarian politics and big business (by the way, there's a term for this, it's called "fascism"). That is a serious problem -- but it's separate from the TikTok issue and shouldn't be used to discount the dangers of the CCP having control over a highly popular social network in the US.
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
It's not perfectly fine, but you need to start with companies of foreign adversaries first.
Regardless, assembly of an iPhone with Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese components in China is not the same as mass surveillance as a service.
In terms of algorithms, most US companies refer to that as intellectual property. Google doesn't sell their search algorithm to other search engines so I don't think your point makes any sense. Companies keep their IP secret for a reason, they don't want competition digging into their profits. What US company isn't engaging in the same completely legal behaviors?
My point about the phones is that China like America can target any electronic like the US was doing 20 years via interdiction. If we look at the NSA ANT catalog, specifically DIETYBOUNCE, everything they accuse China of is stuff we practically invented.
edit: Also I just purchased a M4 Mac mini, shipped directly from China.
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
China? Not so much, given their history.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
I'd never heard of it, and from what I understand, it's a hashtag people use to share stories of how they found out they were pregnant late in the pregnancy because they didn't have pregnancy symptoms. But I don't understand why that would be bad for people to share/consume.
at least in the facebook groups i have seen, this ^ describes the majority of participants
It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.
The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.
Seriously, even in Germany the public opinion about tiktok is so much influenced by people not even having used the app even once (seen some of the good parts of it).
I download all my favorite YouTube videos because inevitably some disappear.
The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.
Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.
Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".
One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.
Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.
Trump has signaled he doesn't support the ban, and wants tiktok under american ownership. The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
So my guess is that this isn't over yet.
Trump initially championed the ban during his first term
Apparently Trump did well on tiktok during the last election, and ByteDance (and everyone else) knows that Trump plays favorites.
Only if there is an in-progress divestiture and only before the ban goes into effect.
Aka, TikTok/Biden would have to announce a sale is in process and Biden would have to enact the extension before the 19th.
The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?
Essentially, Trump started the TikTok ban, Biden continued it, and Congress finally put it into law. And now both Trump and Biden, as well as Congress, are shying away from actually enforcing the ban.
• In August 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order finding that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in [China] continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
• President Trump determined that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the platform “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users” and is susceptible to being used to further the interests of the Chinese Government.
• Just days after issuing his initial Executive Order, President Trump ordered ByteDance Ltd. to divest all interests and rights in any property “used to enable or support ByteDance’s operation of the TikTok application in the United States,” along with “any data obtained or derived from” U. S. TikTok users.
• Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance Ltd. negotiated with Executive Branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve those concerns. Executive Branch officials ultimately determined, however, that ByteDance Ltd.’s proposed agreement did not adequately “mitigate the risks posed to U. S. national security interests.” 2 App. 686. Negotiations stalled, and the parties never finalized an agreement.
• Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Then Gaza happened.
The last time we had two smart candidates was 2012.
The Democrats lost strongholds like Miami of all places. The dumbest thing they did was go against the tech industry who have always been their biggest supporters. Would Republicans go after Evangelical Christians or the NRA?
They gave people no reason to support them.
Yes, because of how ignorant much of the population is, correlating lower grocery prices with whoever was in office at the time.
> They gave people no reason to support them.
Given how bad the alternative was they were the only rational choice.
Do you think the population got more ignorant in 4 years? This is all on the DNC and Biden. Biden should have either voluntarily not run or stronger Democrats should have had a primary and crucified him.
The DNC lied to the American public for years. They knew that Biden wasn’t all there. They basically tried to do a “Weekend with Bernie” on them.
Not to mention that strategically for the first time in modern history they had the new industry titans in their back pocket - BigTech - and threw them under the bus.
The American population doesn’t care about going after BigTech like HN does.
No, but frankly if it was that should have been enough.
> Do you think the population got more ignorant in 4 years?
Yes, obviously. Or at least more ignorant people decided to vote this time.
Any other Democrat could have distanced themselves from Biden. But his own VP couldn’t.
Democrats lose due to significant ignorance in the population and successful propaganda by hostile entities. It's not an accident that the reddest states at the least educated and least literate. If you doubt that I'm happy to support the claim, but I think we both know it's true.
> They are completely out of touch with what the mainstream wants.
Democrats are the only party actually offering to give the majority what they want, but due to ignorance and propaganda the majority have become emotionally hostile to the means necessary to accomplish implementing what they want.
Despite Trump's promises that gullible desperate people fell for, his policies are likely to make things much harder for hid voters and not only not give them what they want, but give them what they explicitly don't want. Well, they'll still get bigoted policies, at least.
> Any other Democrat could have distanced themselves from Biden. But his own VP couldn’t.
There should have been no reason to. Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic. That people voted for him at all shows just how bad things are.
Democracy can't function with such a gullible population. At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
I am trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but you are not making it easy. One could easily argue that given that Trump won, majority got what they want already. Please tell me that you understand what I am telling you now. I did manage to hear some people drawing appropriate conclusions from this cycle, but I am not certain you did.
<< Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic.
Yeah.. a felony in this case being the equivalent of a parking ticket in business; not to mention national level politics. It is hard for me understand why people have a hard time grasping that and/or why this was not a useful label for this election cycle. Hell, the moves taken ( including mug shot ) did the exact opposite of the desired effect.
<< At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
Enjoy the ride man. It is gonna get wild.
Get off your high horse. If you lose the election, you are the ignorant. The democrats lost because they over-estimated their hand and under-estimated the intelligence of the general populace.
The democrats were in a position of power. The only thing you need to do is to not screw up.
If the DNC was trying to win, they would have never let Biden run for re-election, and then they would have never let Harris become the candidate without a primary.
The Democrats literally told the US population Trump was going to destroy democracy in America, and then created a situation that enabled him to win in a landslide.
From a left leaning publication
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/12/opinion/opinion-renee...
And from the WSJ (I don’t know how the paywall bypass works. I pay for Apple News and read the entire article).
The WSJ is right leaning when it comes to business. But I find it to be fair and not Trump worshipper
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bidens-bitterness-came-back-to-b...
When it all comes down to it. Biden was no better than Trump. They both are old folks who put their own desires above what is best for the country.
Democrats lost because they keep triangulating and trying to appeal to centrist Republicans who either don't exist, or would never vote for them regardless. If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide - which was the single issue much of her base cared about - she would have won.
Also, Trump didn't win in a landslide. It was a close election, and Trump definitely won the popular vote, but the margins were still about 51% to 49%.
Everyone thinks that their one particular issue was the crucial one, but all the data shows that the issues that actually mattered were A) inflation and B) the border / immigration / crime / perception of disorder.
The only two Dem Senators that underperformed Harris were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The rest of the downballot had been running hard centrist on the border for much longer and with less baggage, and guess what, they did better.
I can't tell if this is some weird cope, satire or honest to goodness opinion.
<< It was a close election, and Trump definitely won the popular vote, but the margins were still about 51% to 49%.
Just like the previous sentence fragment. Narrow facts are true, but manage to completely miss the picture.
Kamala didn’t lose in Miami of all places because of her stance on Palestine. Nor did she lose every swing state for that reason.
The point is Harris would have been replaced in a primary. Democrats needed a candidate who could call Biden out on his failures, namely, not taking inflation seriously (Manchin said so!) and completely flubbing it on the border.
> If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide
She would have lost worse in Pennsylvania and maybe picked up Michigan and had absolutely zero effect anywhere else because foreign policy wasn’t a material factor in this election. (It was a loud factor. But not in an electorally relevant way.)
I get the impulse to do this. My pet war was Ukraine. But neither was actually voted on because Americans don’t tend to think about foreign policy unless we’re actually at (or about to go to) war ourselves.
Yes, that's precisely the argument of the pro-ban faction. China doesn't allow TikTok in China. It's not about the money, it's about control over a medium that can be exploited for influence, or at the very least the effects of that platform on its audience.
It's silly to pretend like ByteDance are acting on principle. Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
edit:
<< Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
China does not pretend to give lipservice to freedom of speech. US does. That is why its population needs to hold its government accountable.
But there is also lot of OC rage-bait.
Democratic outcomes that don't agree with our politics are officially deemed illegitimate, even if the elections are certified as fair.
It would be crazy to believe the US is somehow shy about running psyops when we openly arm rebels and bomb countries.
I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.
And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.
So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?
This is balkanization.
The bizarre episode with Elon this week really didn’t help given it appears his whims trump any sense of rules or basic decency.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
what percentage of americans vote for a given president? hint: it is less than 32%.
From the US side it may look like that, but the EU doesn’t see it that way.
Half joking, but the US performs corporate espionage in the EU and certainly takes compromising material on EU politicians whenever it can get it.
The slavish adherence from EU NPC politicians (they are mediocre and no one knows how they manage to rise) to US directives has to have some reasons. Being compromised is one of those.
The reason that the EU "adheres to US directives" is mostly just a legacy of WWII and the Cold War, you don't really have to posit any kind of nefarious espionage scheme to explain why European countries want to stay connected to the US economy and military.
Lovely precedent we just set here.
Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]
(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Incorrect- federal powers do not override constitutional rights like free speech.
They take as much data as any of the various other manufacturing processes we outsourced over the decades.
A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.
And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...
Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.
Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
[1]: https://x.com/Roots_Action/status/1767941861866348615
This may be a bit of relevance when talking about how banning a website get applied through the legal system.
Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).
We're not (yet) like the UK or EU where rights holders can click a button and have IPs blocked without due process.
The law levies fines against distributors of the app, it doesn't ban possession or block the operation of the app itself.
Ie, Google and Apple are forced to delist TikTok or face heavy fines