>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
Because we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens. If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda (not even close to what TikTok actually is), they should be allowed to do so. That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...
Does that put us at a disadvantage to countries who don't have the same rules? Maybe. But that ideal and that principle is valuable and means something and IS the entire bedrock of American influence over the greater world.
As other commenters have said, the GP's argument is not about free speech but about trade.
Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms. If someone makes a video of a TikTok video and shares it on Youtube/Whatsapp, that's legal. The actual content is legal, so it's not a free speech/censorship issue.
This is the equivalent of "We've put sanctions on China. You can write whatever you want, as long as you don't do it using Chinese pens and Chinese paper"
It's not at all unusual for countries (including the US) to restrict commerce with a country if they believe the other country isn't engaging in fair commerce.
What I find troubling about this is the delta between the vox populi and the decision made.
Whether it's right or prudent or whatever, if you figure that people using the service don't want it shut down (~170M or roughly half of the population) then what's happening here is that our "representatives" are doing what they always do and totally ignoring their constituency.
Mind you, this isn't surprising in the least, but perhaps it's a good moment to step back and reflect a little on this snag in our governance.
I think a lot of this is the language used in reporting around it. It is presented as a Ban on Tiktok in headlines and people who regurgitate them when the purpose of the legislation is not to ban Tiktok but require them to sell their American operations to a domestic company. The penalty for non-compliance is to not allow them to operate in the US but the goal isn't to ban Tiktok.
That's a gross oversimplification, and I think you know it. We're not idiots here.
On any given year in the last decade, about 1/3 (sometimes more, sometimes less) of voters have been registered independent. George Washington was the last independent president.
We take for granted that campaign promises are there to be reneged on. Even assuming legitimate alignment with a given candidate (that is, that they are genuine about representing you), this more or less means you're not getting what's on the label.
It's well known that unless you live in one of like 6 states your vote won't affect the outcome of a presidential race. Those states tend to have lower populations.
The system is broken, and it has been for a long time. The number of things that get between your vote and the implementation of policy are enough to ensure that your voice is unimportant - whether this is by accident or design is another conversation but I haven't yet seen a reasonable argument that what we have is even remotely functional. I'm open to hearing one if you have it.
Except this is not about commerce. US wants to ban TikTok for the same reason Russia has blocked BBC. Russia believes that information from BBC can harmfully influence people's mind.
> Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms.
Yes, it does impinge free speech. It's not about being able to say things, it's about freedom to hear speech. The first amendment and freedom of speech also covers that, and there is speech on Tik Tok that is not available elsewhere.
As I said, they are not banning listening to the speech on Tik Tok videos. If someone makes a mirror of all TikTok videos and posts it on Peertube, it is totally fine to listen to it.
They are banning one delivery mechanism. Not the content.
By this logic, when Howl was banned from publication, you could argue it wasn't a problem. If Ginsberg performed Howl in public it would be fine. They were just banning one delivery mechanism, his press
> If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda ... That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The first amendment in the bill of rights in the US constitution prevents the US government from restricting the speech of US citizens. It doesn’t say anything about foreign nationals with no status in the US. The government also has the authority to deport whomever it likes, impose tariffs and restrict imports.
Regardless of moral stance, that is the reality as I see it.
The first amendment prevents the US govt from restricting the speech of anyone in the US, not just citizens.
For example, the government cannot deport an immigrant simply because they criticized the government (they can deport for a variety of other reasons though).
> courts will not look behind [the] decision [not to waive the statutory exclusion of an alien] or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of those who would personally communicate with the alien
Interesting. Yeah, I'm broadly not sure how the first amendment applies to this TikTok bill, if at all.
I think TikTok is a security risk, but it seems to me that if the govt can ban TikTok, it can legally ban any foreign media. Which doesn't seem ideal from a free speech perspective.
160 million US citizens post/watch those videos on tiktok, tiktok is their platform for expressing themselves, by banning tiktok, they can argue that the government is taking away their platform for expressing themselves.
Regarding GP's argument, I would argue it's less about freedom of speech and more about trade protection. Although software is not a physical good, letting another country restrict us and simultaneously flood our market is not good either.
I'd wager that most Americans want fairness in relationships with other countries. And also want the government to protect them against hostile foreign governments that wish to do them harm.
Americans subject themselves to all kinds of restrictions in terms of what can be imported into the US. There's no contradiction of the freedoms protected by US Constitution in this.
There's certainly no information that Americans need deny themselves by insisting that apps like TikTok are not controlled by hostile foreign governments.
I find it really interesting how being against a ban is the "freedom" argument when the person who is most responsible for championing this ban is the whole Palantir gang led by Keith Rabois's partner.
So if TikTok was not earning any profit from US (for example, if it was sponsored by the govt), there would be no commerce and it would not be banned? I do not believe that.
Profit is not the standard for the regulation of commerce in the United States though.
When the federal government set limits on crop production with the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause as its justification, Roscoe Filburn was simply growing wheat over the limit to feed his farm animals. That wheat was never sold, and it never crossed the property line to leave his farm, much less crossed state lines. The government still fined him and he lost his case in SCOTUS establishing precedent in Wickard v. Filburn, because it affected the market prices of wheat, despite the miniscule impact.
The same could be said of TikTok even if it doesn't earn a penny in profit.
What is the nature of that commerce? I don't think you can ablate the 1A concerns this easily.
(Note that I am sympathetic to the idea that TikTok is a source of foreign influence. But it's not clear to me what precedent allows the US congress to control their ownership without doing the same to every "US" corporation that's incorporated in Ireland.)
I agree with this in principal, but in practice it seems troubling to have every person (even beyond kids) hooked on a stream of info that is controlled by a foreign government who doesn't like us very much.
If your plan is that people should be strong enough to uninstall or smart enough to recognize subtle propaganda, that seems very likely to fail.
The premise of strong freedom of speech rights is that the government being smart enough to decide what is illegal propaganda may fail as well, sometimes more catastrophically.
>we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens
We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.
We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
>We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
So instead we should let our better-educated governing betters and cultural/business elites decide opinion not just for themselves but for the rest of us? Because of course none of them are subject to any sort of self interest, terrible bias, corruption, mendacity or simply being ignorant due to their own cognitive failures?
The very core notion of democracy and free speech is that no one group can be fully trusted to hold the reins of control or opinion by their own decision and imposition on the rest.
Thus you introduce the largest plurality possible of rights for expression and governance to mitigate against the disasters that much more often occur with oligarchy. Far from perfect but your idea of giving any key group control of discourse for the sake of "fighting misinformation" (as if they themselves don't create shit barges of it of their own) is laughable.
Recall please (for example) that the NY Times, which spent the Trump years and beyond practically raving about the dangers of misinformation and foreign influence of opinions also happily played along with the vastly costly lies of the Iraq WMD scandal that was used to justify an invasion costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And it did all this lying at the behest of completely domestic U.S. policy makers and leaders.
That's the sort of cozy opinion/policy leadership practices to which we should be pushing further? Fuck no.
This level of censorship isn't good, it's very bad. It's also concerning the speed at which the government mobilized to do this. It's a rapid crackdown on free speech and individual freedom.
Nothing is being censored. If ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok will be removed from App Stores and have to find new web hosting. TikTok.com will still resolve fine.
> Could you help me understand how that isn't censorship
Censorship bans the speech. If we were censoring Bytedance, we’d block TikTok.com.
This is more in the vein of “you can’t advertise your brothel at the elementary school.” You can still advertise your brothel. The distribution and amplification is just being regulated.
If we stretch your argument to absurd then we can say that putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters.
> putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters
Free speech is a big topic. I would argue that yes, that person’s speech has been curtailed, but depending on what they were jailed for (saying something offensive versus stabbery) it could be reasonable.
Unless they were jailed for their speech, what you describe would not amount to censorship.
Trump tried to do this 4 years ago, how is that a "concerning" level of speed? The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been reviewing Tik Tok's Project Texas initiative to handle US data separately for 2 years. This was not an out of the blue move. The citation for those claims are in the linked article.
Because we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens. If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda (not even close to what TikTok actually is), they should be allowed to do so. That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...
Does that put us at a disadvantage to countries who don't have the same rules? Maybe. But that ideal and that principle is valuable and means something and IS the entire bedrock of American influence over the greater world.