It's really, really dangerous that this is seriously being considered. Yes, it's Chinese-controlled. Yes, China ~bans US social media in China. But this is a giant, unchecked lever for the government to suppress free speech. And it's being delegated to the executive branch. All it takes is a president with radical views and an ineffective congress and you have a much more powerful censorship apparatus.
When I started using the internet in the mid-90's this would have been the accepted normal view - obviously we should be free to view any publicly available website (barring situations where the site itself is hosting content like sexual abuse against minors, etc.), it's absurd to think otherwise. I detest the CCP but still think that it's horrifying the US wants to ban tik tok, even if it _were_ foreign propaganda you should be allowed to see it if you wish.
"People should be allowed to see whatever they want, but if they are attracted to influences controlled by the boogeyman, then the government knows better and should cut off your access, for your own good."
This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media. Considering how magnificent CCP's censorship machine has grown into today, the slope is not that slippery.
> This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media.
This is the justification for censoring China's official government media in the west.
It's absolutely bizarre that they can censor China's government media on the grounds that it might contain messages from the Chinese government. We're long past the slippery slope; we're not even coherent. It's so dumb that we have to pretend like the government of China is a revolutionary terrorist organization in order to convince people not to question the logic of suppressing the speech of designated enemies.
It's not only what you can see on the platform. It's what the platform puts on every device the viewer uses to access. Spyware that scans the rest of the device for data, that streams information back to Chinese servers, and more.
Perhaps we should ban the app, while allowing the web site.
I'm all for banning apps that carry spywares (either by app store policies, or privacy laws), but I see no reason why such ban applies only to apps published by Chinese companies, rather than all apps.
Outside of spyware we should also consider the fact that Tiktok tailors it's algorithm to serve educational content in China and nuclear waste-grade garbage to the West. That should provide some guidance here. We need to move past the black-or-white thinking and add more nuance to the discussion.
China wouldn't allow a social network to abuse Chinese children, but in the US the only social networking business model is shoveling crap into the mouths of children and teenagers. Their crime is identical to Youtube's, and nobody is considering banning that.
I might be out of the loop, but I thought the original plan was just to force China to sell the assets to a company based in the US, not actually ban tiktok.
Why are we even letting Chinese internet companies freely compete in US markets when US companies are de facto forbidden from operating in China? At minimum, a requirement of reciprocity should be in place before we even consider allowing mainland Chinese tech companies to operate here.
TikTok isn't even novel either. Before TikTok there were Vine and Musicly. Removing TikTok isn't speech suppression since other platforms can easily take their place.
US social networks can operate in China if they follow Chinese censorship laws. Chinese social networks can operate in the US if they follow US censorship law. What the US is doing is creating special laws, or even acting extrajudicially, to attack a Chinese social network for behavior that it fails to condemn in US social networks.
The punchline is that it amounts to a bill of attainder, so in order to avoid that criticism, they're going to create censorship laws for all media and simply promise to selectively enforce them.
While meta is quite horrible the behavior lol and what TikTok does is way way worse and specially different from what facebook twitter or Insta try to do.
US citizens are allowed to access Chinese social media even though Chinese citizens are not allowed to access US social media because the Chinese government is oppressing their people and trying to prevent them from accessing foreign information sources, whereas the US government is not yet oppressing their people in the same manner (and constitutionally forbidden from doing so).
It sounds unfair from the perspective of companies wanting a right to market access, but companies do not have rights, people do. People's right to freely choose where they get their information from trumps companies' non-existent right to have the government shut out their competitors.
Reciprocity is there - follow PRC media filtering (read censorship) laws. There's a reason google and facebook both had internal projects to engineer PRC compliance to reenter PRC before internal corporate dissesnt shut it down. The only reason western platforms were booted from PRC in first place was not censoring calls for violence / terroism post 2009 minority riots because muh freedom of speech, but actually because following PRC filtering requirements = onerous moderation (read expensive) that every PRC platform had to follow (and pay for). Few years later western platforms get roasted for radicalization/violence and realized PRC was precient in social media censorship and forced to adopt their own bulk moderation systems and realize some tweaks can get them back in PRC market. Like if US wants genuine reciprocity, just do a JV like in PRC that favours US interests. Even PRC hasn't implemented something as bold as a force sale or "ban" for largely following domestic PRC laws.
Have some perspective. The US used to solve things by outright evicting Chinese workers or interning Japanese. If the solution to stem foreign influence and manipulation is to throttle/ban an app that platforms crazies - then I must say that the US has grown a lot as a country. Also as a side note, your right to free speech is not really protected when it comes to private companies. US citizens should have a right to say whatever they want, but not everyone should have an a platform to build an audience. Very divisive people are having their reach disproportionately magnified to divide people
The perspective I get from those two examples is that we do things that embarrass us later, so we should be /more/ aware and hesitant in the present, not pat ourselves on the back for improving.
Please explain how my free speech is taken away by a TikTok ban. I don't understand.
Depending on the day, HN is convinced that
1. free speech is an obligation of private companies to their customers
2. free speech is an obligation of the government to companies
It is neither.
> 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.
Banning TikTok wouldn't take your free speech away, but the Restrict Act doesn't even directly ban Tiktok. It gives the government broad rights to censor any content it deems "undermining the democratic process" among other things, and gives it the power to enforce large fines and long prison time against people who help get around the ban (like providing a VPN).
The Restrict Act basically allows the US to impose Chinese-level censorship across the "Western" internet and persecute any one in the US who helps circumvent the censorship.
Sure it may be used to ban Tiktok, but what do you think will happen when the next whistleblower posts content online? What happens when the US finds cryptography for us normal people a threat to US democratic process? Ect ect...
Calling it the TikTok ban is just clever marketing sugar to make the censorship go down...
> The Restrict Act basically allows the US to impose Chinese-level censorship across the "Western" internet and persecute any one in the US who helps circumvent the censorship.
This statement is at least as misleading as the "Tiktok ban" rhetoric you're criticizing.
How? They could declare everything and anything as antidemocratic. There is legitimately no oversight to the Secretary of Commerce, which is an appointed position.
If the act is passed, the only thing stopping the government from taking it to such an extreme is the self-control of the government itself. That isn't very reassuring.
> Please explain how my free speech is taken away by a TikTok ban. I don't understand.
The executive is unilaterally deciding users cannot have an app on their phone, and that as a US citizen I cannot access APIs in another country simply because the executive has declared it.
For me it is all about how this is implemented and there is no way I can see this not being implemented in a way that serves as a vast expansion of government powers.
Do they shut tikTok out of DNS?
Do they tell people they aren't allowed to install the app?
Do they tell google and apple they aren't allowed to have the app in the app star?
Do they block their IPs from being routed in the US?
There's no real way to bring a "TikTok" ban into effect that doesn't constitute a massive increase of power the executive has to regulate the internet.
On the flip side I 100% think we need to figure out how to get TikTok out of here as it is 100% a tool by the CCP. So I am conflicted and confused.
> The executive is unilaterally deciding users cannot have an app on their phone, and that as a US citizen I cannot access APIs in another country simply because the executive has declared it.
I can understand not liking that, but it has nothing to do with free speech. This is regulating commerce.
> There's no real way to bring a "TikTok" ban into effect that doesn't constitute a massive increase of power the executive
TikTok is a company with a balance sheet to protect. They'll pull their app when told to avoid the US government taking their money. Apple and Google will also pull it from the app store. There's nothing new here.
None of things you list here have anything to do with speech, though. Nor do they oppress the things you say.
The point of parent’s comment is calling this oppression of speech is incorrect, and I’d agree. Does that make this any less of a bad thing? In my mind, no! But lets argue for or against it on genuine terms.
Isn't tiktok a tool used for speech? If we take away phones, radios and TV is that blocking free speech? I can still technically go outdoors and shout but my reach isn't as far. I mean I guess I can technically still articulate my opinions without retaliation and legal sanction but I think this goes against the "censorship" bit if they take away our platforms.
I don’t know. To me there is a difference in blocking a specific tool versus blocking a specific topic or phrase, which is what I would call censorship.
Even the media type being blocked still has (albeit worse) alternatives; instagram, youtube, snapchat, and probably others have a similar format that could still be used. So it’s not really preventing us from using the “short clip” format for speech in general.
Maybe I’m just old. But it feels disingenuous to call it an affront to freedom of speech. TO BE CLEAR, it’s not GOOD, and I don’t think it should HAPPEN. But it’s just weird to see the meaning of words shift before my eyes.
That's fair. This act alone I don't think is an attempt to suppress American voices. It's wrong for other reasons. Still worried it sets a bad precedent for shutting down things they don't like.
Some people like to express themselves via posting videos to tiktok. If the government bans tiktok, these people are no longer able to express themselves in this manner, i.e. their freedom of speech has been limited.
Likewise, as a consumer of content, you no longer have access to the opinions posted to tiktok if it is banned. This may limit your ability to be exposed to certain ideas.
I am not sure. Billboards are mostly used for ads, so that seems less relevant from a freedom of speech view. But if billboards were systematically used to share political ideas and criticize the government, and as a response the government decided to ban them, that may be an issue.
It is also notable that the other firms you mention are American, and thus may embody a certain viewpoint and culture.
I picked some that are popular in the US because they're alternatives to TikTok.
I find it hard to believe that a single medium like billboards or an app like TikTok is such a unique thing that it's a burden on people to communicate without them.
I see your point. But I do not think the burden to use alternatives matter - the fact is that people are using tiktok to express themselves in a protected manner, which means that restricting it is a free speech issue. Further, the tools and moderation policies of tiktok are different enough that there may not be a viable alternative to discuss certain ideas in certain ways.
Otherwise, one might argue that the government can ban specific newspapers as there are other newspapers where journalists can publish, or that the government can cab paper newspapers since people can publish online.
You admit your ignorance, but when people who aren't ignorant contradict your assertions, you double down on your ignorance and consistently move the goal posts.
At the end of the day, you are arguing in support of violations of the first amendment. If you find that declaration insulting, reevaluate why you insist your ignorance is the right approach.
> Please explain how my free speech is taken away by a TikTok ban.
The government prevents you from communicating with TikTok.
“Banning TikTok would violate the First Amendment. The government can’t impose this type of total ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious, immediate harm to national security. There’s no public evidence of that type of harm, and a ban would not be the only option for addressing that harm if it did exist,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.
Personally, I tend to let the ACLU guide my opinion in these cases, as they are the experts here.
> Depending on the day, HN is convinced that
Let's do this.
> free speech is an obligation of private companies to their customers
The use is common parlance here. In this case, the idea is the company allows it's users to speak relatively freely (within the limits of what their T&C say). The companies generally push toward some level of preferring to allow speech rather than blocking it entirely.
Your average HN person here understands we aren't literally talking about the 1st Amendment in this case.
> free speech is an obligation of the government to companies
In this case, the government can't limit a company's speech. This has been upheld numerous times in the courts. The government can't require a company or people at the company to say something, except in special circumstances.
> It is neither.
It's interesting you take a literal approach to this in a post where you say this: "HN is convinced."
HN is simply two letters. The two letters are convinced of nothing. They are letters and cannot be convinced.
If by HN, you mean Hacker News, this website, then again, the website itself does not think. It cannot be convinced of anything. It's code that returns content.
If you mean people here on HN, the community, then your comment proves your statement is incomplete and, therefore, misleading. It is not just one of two options.
Basically, if you don't understand the context of the use of "free speech" in normal every day conversation and instead want it to be taken one way and one way only, you should really check your comments themselves for the use of colloquialisms so you don't do the same thing.
TikTok doesn’t need to be part of the press, it just needs be composed of humans protected by the First Amendment, the same way the NYT is composed of humans protected by the First Amendment.
Same logic applies to every part of the first amendment:
1. Can government ban the Episcopal Church as long as they don’t prosecute individual members of if?
2. Can government ban Ruthless Records from selling the song “Fuck the Police”?
I think "press" can include companies. How would you define a member of the press? Banning a church seems like a different topic, but I would say banning a newspaper violates the First Amendment.
I'm old enough to remember the radio version of "Fuck the Police" because playing the song was banned.
The freedom of the press is the freedom to print (“press”) and distribute writing. Just like freedom of speech, it can possibly be pursued by an individual, but the first amendment also protects groups of people acting together in corporate form. The government can easily engage in tyranny if it’s able to squash groups of people who dissent together.
TikTok, like any other product with user driven content is using Section 230 to disavow responsibility for the content on their app.
If it's not TikTok's speech how can they claim the first amendment? The users speaking can just as easily use a different app, website, newspaper, whatever.
I mean, short form video is available on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and those are just the ones I know about. How is having one less option impacting someone's ability to speak?
"People use a product to speak therefor the product cannot be regulated" is not a claim I'd heard before the TikTok debate. Seems to contradict previous interpretations of the first amendment that allowed the regulation of cable, TV broadcast, and radio.
The press isn't designated by law anywhere but dictatorships (where you have to be licensed to be a legitimate journalist.) The press is any medium that a citizen of the US is expressing themselves through.
> The press is any medium that a citizen of the US is expressing themselves through.
So everyone is the press and any product used to speak cannot be regulated? This country has regulated TV broadcast and radio for longer than I've been alive so that's a pretty big change.
Can someone explain how a law that allows to ban apps with foreign ties = "unchecked lever for the government to suppress free speech"?
I'm not from US but it seems pretty obviously a thing a country that cares about security in the information age should be able to do. It does not mean banning apps left and right, but if a viral app is owned by a country that has open animosity to you and the app clearly does shady things (remember injected keyloggers in tiktok's webview?) it may be critical to be able to ban it quickly. If it's not possible, that's just a massive security hole. This seems like all there is to it
It is a libertarian argument. The weaker the government, the stronger individual power, and therefore freedom is.
We had some founding fathers who were libertarian in nature, but today's crop of libertarians don't have the same education level, class, or philosophical understanding that our founding fathers did, so they don't focus on key distinctions.
Protection from foreign interests is a government concern, while controlling individuals is not a government concern.
They frame the conversation around them being controlled rather than a foreign interest being fought for mindshare. The framing determines the assessment.
> All it takes is a president with radical views and an ineffective congress and you have a much more powerful censorship apparatus.
How so exactly w.r.t TikTok? And how do you know it's not already being censored or manipulated to show you content that makes you think it would be bad to ban TikTok? Of course this is anecdotal but I haven't come across very many people who use TikTok and support a ban, but I have come across many people who don't use TikTok and either don't care or do support a ban.
A much more interesting element here anyway is that Bytedance wasn't paying their dues to Republicans or Democrats via lobbying and so they're using this continued "threat" to get Bytedance to pony up like all the other tech companies. That's the actual dangerous thing here.
Is this anything more than a slippery slope argument? Should the government have no power to regulate media entities owned by hostile foreign governments? Should Congress be allowed to take actions to stop Russia from spreading misinformation designed to destabilize the US?
There's a VERY big difference between regulating a company's right to operate in the US and the government controlling what content is allowable while they operate. The latter is very strongly protected by over a century of jurisprudence. The former is not.
That's not true; all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government belong to the states, and congress doesn't have the right to override that.
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy, not a rhetorical fallacy. Defeating the Nazis is nothing more than a slippery slope. We have to stop the Russians in Ukraine or else they'll get greedier and more belligerent is just a slippery slope.
Your argument is a slippery slope you decided to slide down. You're saying, if we do this one thing we'll end up with no power to regulate.
As a philosophical exercise, how dangerous is "banning" fentanyl?
Treating it as a criminal issue rather than a health issue is arguably quite bad. Giving the government control to suppress what we can put in our bodies, and how we choose to exercise our pursuit of happiness is a dangerous precedent. Yet those who try fentanyl often become enslaved to it. They lose their freedom because they don't understand the consequences.
I don't think it's so easy to apply a rule like "freedom good, restriction bad." I think the parallels to fentanyl are philosophically sound.
That is cargo cult politics. It's applying the ritual of "supporting freedom" without understanding where freedom comes from.
> They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Letting an anti-democratic, anti human rights, arguably Han supremacist, foreign adversary exercise a great deal of influence over your people is an extremely dangerous game. China has every ability to enshittify their products to support the CPC, just like our own social media products are enshittified for their investors or advertisers.
At the very least, if you want freedom, you must support education, but you run into exactly the same problem. What if you have an unchecked lever to choose curriculum. What if the people in power do the wrong thing?
> All it takes is a president with radical views and an ineffective congress and you have a much more powerful censorship apparatus.
Then you get to the core of the issue. If you want good governance, you need good governors. Good governors are one such "something essential" that separates ritual from actual. If fascists are getting into power, maybe the more important thing is to focus on how that is happening and how to prevent it. It is probably not good to let ultimately fascist entities become popular enough to get into power by being good, and then use that power for evil once they have enough that they don't need to grow anymore.
You arent talking, you are consuming. You can consume all you want using web interface. App tracks users, builds detailed profiles and can be used to spy and manipulate whole population (elections). Sure bookface does the same, but bookface is under US jurisdiction and there can be at least a glimpse of oversight. The only oversight tiktok receives comes from Chinese Communist party officials lawfully installed there "to provide necessary conditions for the activities of party association.".
If you have a president with radical views and an ineffective congress then the government is already broken. The problem in that scenario is not this bill. And it's not likely that this bill would make things materially worse.
I 90% agree with you. I do however think that TikTok deliberately shows anti-US cultural stuff.
My thinking is probably is not logical on this, rather emotional: I like quality news organizations like Democracy Now sometimes taking a hard look at US foreign policy, etc. (and for years I have given them monthly donations because it is difficult to find good news sources). It feels good to praise my country when it deserves praise and criticize its behavior when it deserves it.
I don’t like a foreign government like China attacking our culture. My analogy: we can criticize the behavior of our children who we love, but no one else can.
Promoting divisive content (eg, “critical theories”) that divide societies based on grievance narratives — cloaking that anti-social behavior under benevolent guises (eg, calling rebuilding institutional racism “equity”).
Given that we’ve watched those grievance narratives trigger widespread violence and arson before an election and a permanent state of racialized looting, I think the US is beyond the point of fixing this with such mild measures. (And TikTok is hardly the only problem.)
And the US hypocritically screams about how even forcing us to disclose our NGOs is “anti-democratic” (eg, in Georgia).
Proponents of the Restrict Act, such as Mark Warner, would say it was because of lobbying.
However, this overlooks the fact that there was bipartisan criticisms of the bill from the likes of AOC, Rand Paul, and Tucker Carlson before the lobbying. The scope of the bill was overly broad since it gave the Commerce Department too much authority to ban any app with foreign ties.
It is somewhat unusual given that chevron deference is regularly abused by the EPA and ATF. We also didn't seem to mind allowing the CDC to temporarily be able to declare moratoriums.
This isn't a commentary on the EPA, ATF, or CDC. It's just funny that this one case was simply a bridge too far for politicians and pundits that are more than happy to permit non-legislative organizations to create legislation at will.
Those things require action in hours or days not months.
An app ban doesn't need to happen on that kind of timescale. If it is that important legislation can be passed on the several months timescale that takes.
Our Constitution doesn't really support anything like this under the legislative so the executive is where it all lives.
In theory a different government layout could allow a different setup but that isn't what we have. You get "decided by the 535 membera of Congress in two votes and Presidential confirmation" or you get an executive branch being deferred power.
They essentially have, via the Supreme Court. McDonnell v. United States, Kelly v. United States and FEC v. Ted Cruz have all confirmed that it is more-or-less impossible to actually prosecute politicians for corruption, so bribery is de facto legal even though there are technically anti-bribery statutes on the books.
Politicians being able to trade stock on private information, supreme court justices getting lavish vacations and book deals, citizens united allowing unlimited cash to be spent getting people to positions of power.
Here's a dissent from citizens united:
> He argued that the court's ruling "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution." He added: "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."
We're already there. There is no doubt in my mind our laws are bought and sold.
A case opening the door to, e.g. a candidate takes out a bank loan at x%, then offers a loan to his own campaign at 2x%. The candidate is then legally allowed to solicit campaign donations after the election is already over, to cover the loan + interest.
It's certainly better than any savings account or investment.
its too bad all that money has to only go to campaigns instead of just their personal pockets
we should legalize that just on the nature that it would be taxed, instead of going to a tax exempt 501(c)4
I think the people could get behind that, “currently our legal bribes are tax exempt, and we’re fixing that revenue loophole in the name of tax fairness”
Unfortunately, this article doesn't talk about what the proposed amendments to the bill actually are. This Reuters article is incomplete, but it's pretty much the only article on the topic. Every other site on Google News has just reused it. So, I have no idea what actually happened (and I wonder if anyone else in this thread knows more).
>" Yet again proving Citizens United was likely the worst piece of legislation written since the PATRIOT act and 1994 crime bill. "
What do you mean? Where is this coming from? CU wasn't mentioned in the article. Also, CU wasn't "legislation", it's a supreme court ruling (which is 'law').
How does the Citizens United Supreme Court decision relate to lobbying?
As I recall, it related to non-candidate related/controlled campaign ads/expenditures.
Lobbying for/against laws long preceded Citizens United.
It enabled corporations and other entities to freely dump almost unlimited money into politics. The capital a mega-corporation like Google, or ByteDance, trounces what citizens can do by an order of magnitude. These entities were always allowed to donate, but in a very limited way. That limitation was ruled unconstitutional.
The decision created a political class openly controlled by corporations. The lobbying you and I could do (or even 1,000,000 of us) will never amount to what ByteDance could do consistently over time.
How exactly does $100 Million dollars get spent on lobbying? The article doesn't say, and I'm genuinely curious as to whether or not this sum is accurate, and where the money actually went.
Here [1] is the 'TikTok bill.' It's actually called the RESTRICT act and does not mention TikTok once. It's core driver is an extremely broad coming down essentially to: "enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person." A "covered transaction" includes anything any "foreign adversary" might have any form of "interest" in, as well as: "The term covered transaction [also] includes any other transaction, the structure of which is designed or intended to evade or circumvent the application of this Act".
The phrasing "designed OR intended" emphasizes that something that CAN be used to circumvent this bill is no different than something that is INTENDED to circumvent the bill. That single line opens up a way for the government to conceivably ban VPNs, Tor, and perhaps even encryption itself. And penalties for violation include million dollar fines and 20 years in prison.
And what would be the most predictable mitigation measure to dynamically and actively respond to any sort of new "threat", on a national and digital level? I realize it sounds hyperbolic, but in my opinion this bill's intent is to establish the foundation upon which the 'Great Firewall of America' can be built. It even includes protections against people trying to bypass it.
It's worth looking at the 2024 Taiwan election as an example of what's going on. China has a vested interest in influencing the election. And you can see it trying to control the truth narrative on TikTok.
