Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In
The authors Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey seem to think that the rule of law and advocating for consistent ruling on constitutionality will have an effect.
If I’ve learned anything about how the Supreme Court works, it’s that this is a political calculation, not a legal one. The outcomes are decided first, and then jurisprudence is employed to substantiate them — not the other way around.
I share your cynicism. Do you see any way out?
I feel the same way about the supreme court justices today as I do about Senators for lightly populated states: people operating with little oversight and with little to no accountability to the people who they hold power over. The bigger problem with the Supreme Court is that, largely, the political calculus is mostly cemented for life of the justice.
The only way out I see for the Supreme Court is a Congress and President who are focused on fixing the issue. But, it still feels general awareness of the Supreme Court issues are still to low and not universally felt- maybe in another 2-4 years.
The cynic in me wishes the Democrat appointed judges would start openly taking such large and egregious bribes too to make judicial term limits a bipartisan issue.
I fundamentally see this as a consequence of the original sin of Senate. Article I, Section 3, Clause 1 and Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 work together to make the Supreme Court a reflection of state values rather than popular values. Any time the two drift apart - due to changing popular opinion, migration, etc, the difference is reflected in political tension. There's no viable escape hatch for popular grievances against the supreme court (impeachment is non-viable again, because the Senate structure) which puts us in a precarious situation.
I don't see a viable way forward since amendments also follow a state structure given Article Five.
> The only way out I see for the Supreme Court is a Congress and President who are focused on fixing the issue.
This is absolutely true. Not so much about the President, who has no legislative authority, but Congress, to be sure.
Congress seems to have abdicated its duty to ensure legislation is clear and consistent and evolves with the times. Many of the SCOTUS opinions I've read--perhaps a majority--get mired in trying to read the tea leaves about Congressional intent, or are frustrated because the parties are using the Court to solve problems that Congress could and should have solved.
There needs to be critical mass for protest and disruption. Palpable anger out on the streets. Unfortunately, we don’t have that right now.
Can you give a recent (last 20 years) example of a Supreme Court political not legal decision?
FWIW, I think the Supreme Court will not uphold the ban. But TBH I don't know the details of the 'ban'.
The decision to ban Colorado from making its own decisions for its own election with regard to what "engaged in insurrection" means and therefore disqualifies someone from their own state's ballots.
Purely political. The law says clearly that states run their own elections and it says clearly that insurrection is disqualifying. Would've been politically inconvenient though (for either side of the spectrum, and especially inconvenient for one side).
That's actually one of the ones that shows how the supreme court isn't always party lines. That was an 9-0 opinion to block Colorado from stopping Trump from running for office there.
Also the constitution clearly gives the federal government the ability to conduct federal elections, not states, and that's exactly what they called out in their brief.
The question wasn't about party lines. It's about the distinction between political judgment and legal judgment.
That has nothing to do with partisanship.
> Also the constitution clearly gives the federal government the ability to conduct federal elections
This is literally not true. Please tell me where in the Constitution the federal government is given this authority. You won't find it, which is why all the contortions around federal authority are political in nature and not legal.
The states run 100% of 100% of the elections within their states, including the elections of the electors in the Electoral College who ultimately elect the President.
The entire opinion (and the misconception that it produces, and you relay here) is a handwavy way to say: it sure would be politically inconvenient if the legal structure actually produced this outcome. If it were a legal decision, the political considerations would be irrelevant: the law says what the law says.
>This is literally not true. Please tell me where in the Constitution the federal government is given this authority. You won't find it, which is why all the contortions around federal authority are political in nature and not legal.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/sectio...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/sectio...
Section 5 gives congress the power, not the state, to enforce section 3.
If you want to say you were right that it's an amendment, ok.
Whoa whoa, what you said is "the constitution clearly gives the federal government the ability to conduct federal elections, not states." This is blatantly false. I presume you discovered that when you looked it up and now you're switching gears.
Now you're mounting a totally different argument which is that Congress has the power to enforce Section 3. This is true, but that does not strip states of power to run their own elections how they see fit. This merely grants power to Congress to enforce Section 3.
You just misunderstand how the Constitution works.
Here's proof: The Constitution does not give states the power to pass laws. It does give Congress the power to pass laws. It giving Congress the power to pass laws obviously does not strip states of their power to pass their own laws.
OK I'll have a read of "23-719 Trump v. Anderson (03/04/2024)"
Cool! Be sure to pay attention to this part:
> "Finally, state enforcement of Section 3 with respect to the Presidency would raise heightened concerns... state-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer"
That's a political consideration, not a legal one.
> "In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up."
That's a political consideration, not a legal one.
>The outcomes are decided first, and then jurisprudence is employed to substantiate them — not the other way around.
I think this is the thing people don't get. Right or left, Democrat or Republican, it just doesn't matter anymore. You have nine of the best legal minds in the country, supposedly, and they constantly vote along party lines. There is no way that happens if the law is actually being respected.
This is just not true. If you examine recent terms, many cases are decided unanimously and others have judges voting across the aisle. Roberts has been incredibly cautious to avoid this happening and has managed the docket specifically to avoid it. The majority on Bostock, where Gorsuch wrote the opinion, is a pretty good example of this. A ton of rulings have been very narrowly tailored specifically to avoid setting precedent, favoring standing or juridsiction more than a tough interpretation of con law.
You might appreciate Roberts' '24 year-end report on the federal judiciary: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2024year-en...
All courts are, sadly, political because judges are human.
It highly depends on the design of the judicial system. As individual people obviously everyone has political opinions, but you can shield the judicial system from being politized. Systems like in Israel where judges or judicial committees have a major say in appointment of judges removes a lot of politics from the equation.
That's how the Prussian/German bureaucracy was designed too. Lifetime civil service and merit based selection basically means the bureaucracy manages itself removed from the political process. The US system is extremely personalized with elections and appointments so it's uniquely nepotistic in a lot of ways.
I mean there's an irony inherent in the way the Supreme Court works in the modern American era: judicial review is not present anywhere in the Constitution, and yet the Supreme Court uses it to uphold or strike down law according to the Constitution. It's inherently a broken branch of government and it was a mistake for the Democrats to base the last 50-70 years of social progress on leveraging it.
This is patently false. Marbury vs. Madison based the principle of judicial review on English common law inherited at the founding.
Just because you say something with enough conviction does not make it true.
> Marbury vs. Madison based the principle of judicial review on English common law inherited at the founding.
I wasn't aware that the Constitution, the document, was English common law. Again, judicial review as a power of the court is not defined within the body of the Constitution. If it is, quote it please, I'll be happy to acquiesce.
Oh wait.. https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re....
> Just because you say something with enough conviction does not make it true.
Indeed.
I think the times have changed. The Great Powers of the world are becoming more hostile to each other yet we continue to operate the naive way. We play by the rules but our rivals have no rules. This makes us weak, exploitable and ineffective.
As such, I support the ban, for the sake of doing something. I admit it's not ideal but we live in a messy and tense world. User's speech isn't really taken away, just use another dopamine feed. Better yet: use none.
You'll find it's in particular activists protesting this move.
The Supreme Court is bought and paid for by the group that wants to <s>ban</s> likely take over. So, regardless of what your thoughts on TikTok are, it's mostly all irrelevant.
TikTok is NOT being banned. TikTok can continue unmodified if it transfers ownership to anyone outside China.
The ACLU is staffed with extremely competent First Amendment attorneys and yet they seem to be intentionally muddying the water about this. As a 1A scholar (and ACLU supporter) myself, I find it extremely frustrating.
I'm not so sure the ACLU is staffed with competent First Amendment attorneys any more. I've read a few articles citing Ira Glasser as being disappointed in the direction the modern ACLU is moving.
ACLU has dropped in quality significantly in the past 10 years IMO and this seems par for course for them since 2016.
Ok, but I think that's as unconstitutional as a ban, by the same logic. But I'm not a lawyer.
How so? Generally speaking, foreign entities do not have the same constitutional guarantees as domestic with regard to laws concerning national security. Mind you, if this was a domestically owned platform, they would have a very strong case.
Even for domestic companies, we've used consent decrees to force them to divest businesses (Standard Oil, AT&T, etc.) after they've been held in violation of antitrust law.
What happens if they refuse to transfer ownership?
Sounds like they are preparing to shut down in the US.
I don't think there's any reason they can't continue as a web app. I think American companies are barred from doing business with them.
https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-will-reportedly-shut-down-its-app...
That's pointless misdirection.
"I'll burn down your house unless you sell it to me for $1"
See, that's not arson, because you always had a way out.
This is a terrible analogy:
1/Selling something doesn't destroy it
2/You don't want to destroy it because you want to fetch a high price for it
3/Nobody's offering $1 for TikTok, and nobody expects ByteDance to accept $1 for it
4/A fair market price would make ByteDance whole
You think forced rushed sales don't depress market prices?
ByteDance has been aware that this was likely to happen for years, and legislation was signed in April 2024, giving them over six months to sell. There's nothing rushed about this at all. ByteDance is playing chicken, and they're looking ever likelier to lose this game.
Change it to $100 or $1M or $1B, it doesn't matter. If you don't want to sell your house you have the right to not sell it.
Eminent domain is a thing. You can absolutely be forced to sell your house to make way for a public project. Hell, after the Kelo decision, you can even be forced to sell it for private benefit.
But they're not asking ByteDance to just divest a portion for US operations, are they? It's successful in many countries, so it seems kind of radical to force them to sell everything just to continue operating in one country.
Like a Russian oligarch?
Banning citizens from using the app seems unconstitutional, but is preventing the the company ByteDance to operate inside the US unconstitutional? Those two seems like two completely different questions even if the outcome is similar.
From a EU perspective, regulating what companies do is not in conflict at all with human rights. The privilege to operate a company, provide advertisement, sell products and services, to use the local economy, all that is regulated. It should also be mentioned that companies generally tend to receive some benefits that individual persons do not, especially when it comes to taxes, risk taking, and debt. Companies can own and operate things which private person can't. The distinction between the rights, responsibilities and privileges that a private person has compared to a commercial company are fairly major.
Why is the ACLU talking like TikTok is a US citizen which free speech rights are being infringed?
Really? From my reading of it, it seems to focus how such a ban would inhibit the speech of US citizens who use the application, not TikTok as an entity.
Regulation that dictate how a company may operate will naturally inhibit the consumers if the regulations is so heavy that the company will no longer exist. That doesn't mean such regulation is impossible.
The ban does not say that US citizens are not allowed to use the application (or apply speech). The method of the ban is similar to those blocking torrent sites, as in blocking them on an ISP level.
ISP already operating a fairly large block lists, both in the US and EU, blocking everything from pirate sites, scam sites, and more serious criminal ventures. The legal frame work generally do not talk about users (outside of deep packet inspection territory). They simply get applied more like industry regulation. It should be noted that the 1965 case has not prevented ISP block lists, and I would assume that the long list of pirate cases where ISP has objected to block lists in the last 30+ years has thoroughly tested the 1965 case. We can also look at the very recent net neutrality situation, where ISP has very much been defined as something very different from the postal service.
As a minor aspect being said in articles describing the ban, the ban would not prevent users from accessing the app if its already installed. As an ISP block it would break the functionality of the app, and new users would only get a spinning bar when trying to download it, but citizens would not be legally bound by the ban. That is mostly semantics but there is a legal distinction.
This is the best point I’ve read about this. I don’t think TikTok should be seen as a facilitator of free speech, because it has no obligations to allow it. It’s a private enterprise with their own community guidelines censorship, but most importantly they control the ”algorithm”. No matter how much these platforms claim to be town squares, they are absolutely not and thus serve no essential speech function. If they did, content would not require installing spyware to see. (In my opinion secret mandatory engagement algorithms don’t deserve even section 230 protections).
On the other hand, it doesn’t sit right with me that ”China scary” is enough to outright block whoever is successful in the surveillance capitalist game invented in the US. It screams of political hit job for hire by the tech oligarchs. It’s like banning Taco Bell for health reasons and leaving McDonalds alone. If the modern US was not a plutocracy, this would have been an opportunity for legislators to do real harm reduction and steer predatory mega-corps in a better direction.
Social media platforms hosted in the USA are voluntarily bending to the President's will.
Social media platforms hosted outside the USA are going to be banned, because national security.
People may not realize or acknowledge it, but we are in the very last days of "free speech" on the internet.
From the ACLU amicus brief (linked in the article)
> Although the D.C. Circuit ostensibly applied strict scrutiny in upholding the ban, it subjected the government’s assertions to little genuine scrutiny in the end
Does the author understand checks-and-balances? The DC Circuit found that Congress did a lot to try to investigate and come to an agreement with Bytedance that would resolve their concerns. After all that, it's Congress' power to decide what to do, not the courts. They are not just allowed to second-guess congress. They can only look at the "how" of the law, the "why" is largely non-justiciable. And if the goal is to stop CCP speech, through the TikTok algo, then there's really nothing to do other than ban TikTok.
Personally I think the ban is xenophobic and we should instead regulate ALL of these apps (X, Meta...) but it is legal
Huawei and several other companies have faced this. Several American companies face this in China. Its not unprecedented. Are you suggesting its unconstitutional because freedom of expression is being curbed? Thats not true, those creators have other platforms to post their content.
To quote directly from the linked article:
"The law’s supporters have, at times, minimized the ban’s impact on the First Amendment, citing the mistaken belief that TikTok users can simply move to another platform. From a constitutional perspective, this is nonsense. The government can’t justify shutting down The Washington Post because readers can simply buy The New York Times instead."
I will say: Tiktok is very popular in many countries other than America. Forcing a company to sell its entire business just to continue operations in one country seems flawed, even if the US constitutes a major share.
The word around socials seems to be that users are just moving to Rednote, another Chinese social media app - doesn't that just defeat the purpose of this and end up with a cat and mouse game?
The ACLU has really lost its way
How does banning a platform reduce free speech? Which topics can you only discuss on TikTok and not elsewhere?
You can still access it through the mobile site, no?
From other comments I have read, the web version should be safe from this
All of these posts keep talking about banning TikTok... The law doesn't ban TikTok. It bans its continued operation in the U.S. under the ownership of a foreign adversary.
The law:
> It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of ) a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out, within the land or maritime borders of the United States, any of the following: ...
In order to take this seriously as speech infringement, you'd have to define software as speech. Precedent holds that the expressive part (source code) is speech, but that the functional part that operates is not speech. This law bans the software function.
TikTok is not being banned. TikTok is being required to sell to a non-Chinese stakeholder in order to mitigate the national security threat of it being indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
These are not the same thing, and it's depressing how vulnerable people seem to be to propaganda anymore. No one can even read a legal brief or a law.
Microsoft is not being banned from China. China just asks that Microsoft sell itself to a non-American company or they will be banned (but it's not a ban).
Absolutely, all of these articles are appeals to emotion. I imagine that works especially for the folks who have an addiction to the propaganda dispenser.
Yeah, and what if they don't comply?
We are getting Lemonade 8 app for US TikTok users to continue.
> If the Supreme Court allows the government to shut down an entire platform on such a flimsy evidentiary record, it would set a disturbing precedent for future government restrictions on online speech.
Something something PATRIOT Act.
The patriot act was supported by everyone when it became law. In fact, one senator had the unmitigated gall to ask the rest of congress, “but what about Constitutional freedoms?”. So the rest of us promptly removed him from office and replaced him with a more law and order type guy. That was pretty much the only resistance to that law at the time.
All that to say, you get what you vote for. And we’ve been voting very poorly for well over thirty years. In any organization, you hire that poorly for that long and you will naturally have some deleterious consequences.
> The patriot act was supported by everyone when it became law.
I was at the time a US citizen, and I thought it was moronic authoritarian bullshit. It was basically written by taking every obnoxious proposal that various cops and spies had been having trouble getting passed, shoving them all in one document, and rushing it through unexamined. In response to essentially no surprising new information, at that.
... and lots of other people said that.
I'll give you that the majority of you supported it, and that the people in Congress (who tend to have a personality type with a certain kind of blindness) supported it. "Everyone" didn't support it.
I just wish they wouldn't stop with tik tok. Facebook, twitter and all the rest present the same danger.
...Explicit CCP control?
Even worse than explicit CCP control.
The equivalent, for sure. Especially with Zuckerberg and Musk veering hard right recently.
I haven't heard the Zuk as a CCP asset conspiracy theory yet. only a matter of time.
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Another bad take by the nazi defenders over at the ACLU. If the same people behind tiktok tried to buy the Washington Post or CNN they would be blocked by existing laws prohibiting foreign adversaries from controlling American media companies, but somehow its fine if its social media? For better or worse social media is where a huge amount of people get their news these days, and unless we want Putin to run the NYT we need laws in place to stop foreign billionaires from filling the discourse with Russian/Chinese/Saudi propaganda (more than they already do).
First, let me preface that I despise TikTok and I think it is mostly garbage content-wise, however this proposal is simply un-American. Concerns about data privacy and foreign influence are legit, but banning an entire communication platform used by 170 million Americans based on hypothetical threats goes against core First Amendment principles especially considering the government's inability to provide concrete evidence of harm or to explain why less restrictive measures wouldn't suffice. If we allow platforms to be banned based on their parent company's nationality rather than actual demonstrated threats, what is next?
In a strange way, if it was a blanket China ban, it would almost feel less arbitrary than this, which was crafted to target ByteDance.
The fact they packaged it inside a funding bill that would have been politically unpopular for Congress to oppose also makes me speculate that they felt it wasn't strong enough to stand up to scrutiny on its own merits
The law technically doesn't limit itself to TikTok. It seems to cover any application or foreign company that meets certain criteria, which include (1) the President identifying it and writing some reports, and (2) some restrictions on the nature of the app, which would cover other social media. It is obviously written to cover TikTok initially (the name even appears in the bill) but the powers it grants are broader. Not sure if this is better or worse.
It's not a ban, it's a forced divestment from Chinese ownership. The real question is why Bytedance isn't willing to take fair market value for Tiktok instead of just losing everything, since that makes no sense if this was just "business" and there weren't ulterior motives involved.
If I owned a business in another country and that other country coerced me to sell against my wishes, I'd be very skeptical about receiving the proceeds from the sale.
So TikTok sells to a domestic company, domestic company wants to wire over $40bn to ByteDance but before the transfer goes through the Treasury Department decides a $40bn payment shouldn't be sent to a "foreign adversary". It's my understanding that the Treasury has a lot of leeway in this.
American platforms are already banned in China.
Some of this is a tit-for-tat, I surmise.
<opinion> The embracing of terrorist sympathizers across the platform is not helping. </opinion>
Turns out that US law (and custom) says the US can't do that particular kind of "tit for tat". I wasn't aware that China had a veto over the US Constitution.
Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade. If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not. The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.
> Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade.
Not as a pretext for speech regulation. And the right to free speech in the US is understood to include the right to listen.
> If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not.
I'd like to think nobody would be arguing, because that would be clearly unconstitutional. But in fact people probably would try to claim it was somehow acceptable. They'd be wrong.
They might get away with a ban on all books from a given country, if they could show it was really, truly intended to affect only the physical process of printing and the market for that service. The instant it's even peripherally intended to affect the content, it's unconstitutional. And the TikTok thing is about content and who controls content.
You could buy obvious Russian propaganda in the US in the middle of the Cold War.
> The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.
Great. Since banning book imports would be blatantly unconstitutional, so is this bullshit.
Except your analogy is flawed. Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US. It's not like the Tiktok's themselves are all Chinese made.
> Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US
The entire argument is about their algorithm. They are not written and published in the USA if someone in China controls what goes in them.
> American platforms are already banned in China.
So if Americans are discriminated in China, would you suggest to do the same with the Chinese in US?
That's making a false analogy and is a logical fallacy trying to compare the two. Finding ways to level international trade to ensure fair trading and equal access to markets is definitely within the government's purview to do and within the national interests of our country.
One rule that I would like to see implemented to equalize trade is to not allow foreign citizens or corporations to be able to purchase real estate in this country or become majority shareholders in any corporation if the country of their citizenship or incorporation does not allow the same reciprocity. It is foolish to allow this kind of imbalanced ownership to happen.
You're statement is true, would should not do the same thing in terms of discrimination, but the two situations are a bit different. Your talking about culture, while this deals more with a outside government's influence on our populace.
For me, think the ACLU makes a valid argument, that this could set a bad precedent. But, the Chinese government already has a system to at least partially monitor and influence what some businesses do (requiring corporations to have role for the CCP in their charters). https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-challenge-communist-corpor.... It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that the CCP uses tik-tok to influence the US populace (think Russia and its use of social media during the 2016 election of Trump).
Yeah, this situation is pretty messy.
Americans indeed have free speech guarantees, but I don't think it's quite so clear that foreign platforms have a constitutional right to provide a platform for said speech. How far does it go? Does a North Korean or Iranian or Cuban app have a guaranteed right to exist in America because some Americans use it for their speech?
Anyone who receives garbage content on TikTok has likely gotten themselves into a bad set of recommendations. I watched someone yesterday cycling through their feed and it was 100% brainrot.
My feed is very enjoyable: mostly neat cinematography tutorials, AI news, and just a little bit of OIIA.
"my feed good, your feed bad"
Wouldn't seem very un-american to prohibit a radio station with a pro soviet leaning stance during the cold war
I have to assume that either there is some ulterior motive at play, or the national security risks themselves cannot be exposed for national security reasons and that this is incompatible with the current justice system unless something like a secret FISA court is involved. Of course that would be a convenient excuse if it weren't actually real, but how would we ever know...
We all know it's just a way for Musk and others to get a really popular social media for cheap. This ban has nothing to do with anything else than that.
Which is why the law was signed by .. checks notes.. Joe Biden?
Because he's both an evil genius and a senile old man at the same time, just like Reagan.
President Reagan, Mastermind - SNL:
ridiculous
If I had children aged 7-17 and felt China was intentionally nudging them via algorithmic suggestions away from STEM and toward vapidness, and if I was unable to control their access to it, I guess I might appreciate that my government had banned it. But, as others have mentioned, it sets a dangerous precedent. If nothing else, this attempted ban has raised national awareness about the negative impacts of TikTok. What could the US Federal Government do instead, assuming it is important to consider such platforms as per their effects on the population?
If China sold candies that contained poison and marketed them to Us children, it would be easy, since the FDA prohibits this. If the FDA didn't exist, perhaps poisoned candy sales would prompt the creation of such a regulatory body.
So I guess I oppose the ban while recognizing the danger, and suggest we consider regulating digital goods in the same manner as consumable foods; if provable harmful effects are evident then that is grounds for a ban of a product on the basis of health protection.
I think the easier framework is this: China has banned her citizens from using most United States-based social networks. This prevents American companies from accruing profit from Chinese citizens and advertisers, and shrinks their potential pool of user data for refining algorithms or selling. As such, it's effectively a trade policy for us to in turn ban her social networks. Unless and until we are equally able to harvest Chinese data and suck yen out of China, she will not be allowed to harvest American data and suck dollars out of here.
While this is a fair take, it's not what the law has in mind.
China is classified as a foreign adversary, so this goes beyond trade policy. Foreign adversaries show a pattern of conduct that threaten national security. People are not comfortable with foreign adversaries having a direct line to our youth's attention and having their finger on the dial.
Let's stoop down to China's level! Rah Rah Murica!
That’s asinine. Every nation responds to things such as tariffs with a proportional response.
We have plenty of evidence that the U.S. has been harmed with our open approach to unfettered access to our electronic systems. Meanwhile our geopolitical adversaries have no qualms about fire walling their citizens from accessing foreign networks at all.
This is a clear case where the U.S. should treat them as they treat us. IMO any 1st amendment arguments are made in bad faith because there are no shortages of non-hostile channels for Americans to speak freely and openly.
Does anyone else remember “free speech zones” from the Iraq War era? Where was this argument then?
Wait, so your position is that the US is harmed by being the global master of the internet (through companies like Meta that are synonymous with the internet in some places in the world) and that we should build the great American firewall to keep our internet in and other's out?
Well, it does offer an avenue for inacting some form of ban. And not so sure it's all that morally low.
Because what China's ban of US social media might say is that China recognizes social-media's power to influence the populace (think Russia's use of Twitter and FB in the 2016 election). Yeah, am actually in favor of some form of restrictions, because we as a country need to realize that social media is a tool that can be used against us.
Yeah, if it was an outside country owning a major US newspaper, it'd be more clearcut.
If social media is so bad let's regulate ALL of it, US firms included.
Personally I fear US-controlled social media more than Sino-controlled ones. It's not like the CCP can come and arrest me here in the US, or really use my data against me in any way. Both have plenty of reasons to throw propaganda at me, or censor certain viewpoints.
At least when it's a foreign country I have a chance of seeing through it, compared to so many domestic media sources currently licking Trump's feet. I'm supposed to feel secure that they'll be telling me the truth over the next 4 years? Acting in my interest?
The forced divestment is for national security reasons. Bytedance, as a Chinese company, is required by law (Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China) to provide full data access to the Chinese government on request, and they are compelled not to reveal when this occurs. Since this is done through legitimate channels (on Bytedance's side), this won't even be caught with an audit. So you have a situation where an app installed on half of America's phones shares all its data with China, along with any potential changes the government recommends for influencing the content.
>The forced divestment is for national security reasons.
Would you like to buy a bridge?
Meta & co are required by US law to do the same for people in the rest of the world. Didn't see a huge US outcry about that, in fact I saw a lot of hate for things like GDPR
The hate for the GDPR I read of is actually about the "allow cookie" popups that aren't needed at all are are just a form of protest by those individual sites because they are storing and selling personal information including IP addresses.
If you aren't engaged in those practices then there's no need for any GDPR annoyances for users.
I may misunderstand, I'm in America currently.
I appreciate a response like this on HN.
IF there is a problem, let's solve the root issue (which may include looking at the algo feeds of all big tech, etc).
I do have children in that age range and see US social media damaging them. Would HN be OK with European governments banning Meta, X, Discord etc?
> Would HN be OK with European governments banning Meta, X, Discord etc?
I'm a bit surprised it hasn't happened yet, although those companies are also willing to adjust policies in foreign nations—for instance, Meta saying it won't eliminate fact checking outside of the US.
> If China sold candies that contained poison and marketed them to Us children, it would be easy, since the FDA prohibits this.
The FDA was created by an act of Congress, as was this ban. These are identical scenarios -- the FDA has a mandate to block certain things, as does the TikTok ban. What's being debated is the constitutionality of it; and there are arguments both ways, but it seems very likely that the ban will hold.
A very naive and hopeful part of me would wish for Facebook, Twitter, and other vapidness-enhancing platforms be regulated too. But the untrusting, freedom loving red-blooded American in me is also wary of government controls and power consolidation bordering on censorship. No easy answers I suppose; we'll just have to find a way to thrive in spite of platforms that profit from our wasted time.
Hey, one platform is Chinese, the others are American. That's the difference you're looking for
> felt China was intentionally nudging them via algorithmic suggestions away from STEM and toward vapidness
A ban based on a feeling?
I think that's where we were with seatbelts in the 1950s, tobacco in the 1920s and alcohol in the 1850s. In all of those cases, society ultimately decided that guardrails were needed.
Yet imagine a law that mandates seatbelts only for non-US manufactured cars...
The main problem is the hyperoptimized addictive nature of some modern social media apps, not who makes them.
> Candies
Starts with an F ends in L
I think the US social media mega corps are kindred spirits and if TikTok is considered harmful/propaganda then so are the US products. The subject draws an uncomfortable amount of heat.