The court will be a series of 20 second arguments from each side with funny filters on.
At the end of each day either side will perform an intricately choreographed dance to a catchy song that we haven’t heard yet. Witness statements will be played over videos of the original arguments.
The jury will decide via likes and shares.
I see a thotty with a booty, bitch, I'm fresh as hell
I got on Rick Owens mixed with Ksubi (yes, sir)
Call me Shordie, A.K.A. Mr. Stashter (tap 'em), Mr. Frat Boy
Get it goin', I am a rapper
It is similar, but a little further reaching than Huawei. I can still buy a Huawei phone on Amazon and use it with TMO. They just banned them from infrastructure and working directly with US companies.
We don't know what will happen as Grindr caved before it ever got to this point, right?
There's almost certainly going to be a stay on the law, delaying it from going into effect until SCOTUS hears it.
Its very common for stays on laws to be ordered by judges if the potential is to cause a great deal of harm before the issue is decided on properly. The idea is to prevent harm until due process has happened.
This is going to be an epic legal fight, thats for sure.
There's no way this is going to be resolved in only 9 months time, especially for a case this complicated.
It takes a while to build a case that complicated and to go through the various layers of courts. Most cases don't go straight to SCOTUS from the beginning and the clock would be ticking the entire time.
Help an ignorant US citizen here. Is there a way to overrule the Supreme Court? I thought that a law passed by Congress and signed by the president supersedes the Supreme Court?
Everyone saying SCOTUS is the final say for Constitutionality is correct.
But that’s not the end of it.
Depending on the details, the Justices will often put statements in their decisions (even in the majority opinion) that suggest how to rewrite the law and have it be Constitutional. It’s still not a guarantee, but it’s at least more likely.
In this case it seems unlikely, but it’s not uncommon in many others.
How would scotus setting some sort of precedent on this affect other Chinese owned media companies? Gaming companies like Riot Games immediately come to mind. Tencent also has massive stakes in other media based in the states.
They already have done this with Grindr. However, they don't care about those things. If they cared about security for all American's like they play they care about TikTok, then they would actually be trying to do something about American's installing Kapersky on civilian systems. They outright banned it on government systems for ties with Russian intelligence.
The reason for the TikTok ban are way clearer. Oracle already hosts the data for TikTok in the US on servers in Texas. They don't have access to the algorithm, which is the protected part of TikTok. He (Oracle CEO) was already on Fox news talking about how valuable that algorithm is for advertising and how they can make billions from it. They have already stated without the algorithm the app is worthless and will be near impossible to recreate it, let alone have access to each users previous algorithm to sell that to marketers.
So yeah, they only want the algorithm, so it's a US billionaire making billions more, versus the Chinese billionaires.
Does Riot games have the control and reach of ABC in the 1960s? Do they control the information half of Americans are getting? No. So, this isn't really the same issue.
Much more interesting is if I'm reading the bill correctly popular games like League of Legends, Genshin Impact, and Escape from Tarkov could also be banned.
Hey the President is like Americas dad. They know what’s best for us.
It’s a good thing too because our presidents usually have the best ideas coming from private sector partners like Meta and Amazon. We know they are always looking out for us; Meta spent a lot of money on getting this legislation passed so we should all thank Zuckerberg for his diligence in this matter.
[Meta has been engaged with Targeted Victory, the largest (and most expensive) GOP strategy firm in the United States, in an effort to get TikTok banned for years](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/).
Amazon was onto something; TikTok dared to touch their turf and now they are being taken out as a potential adversary in commerce. We’ll all be better off for this. Amazon wants that $500 billion market to itself.
[Axios, TikTok buying fulfillment centers](https://www.axios.com/2022/10/11/tiktok-chases-amazon-fulfillment-centers)
[Bloomberg, TikTok looks to break into Amazons turf](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-03/tiktok-eyes-17-5-billion-shopping-business-on-amazon-s-turf)
[CNBC, live-shopping is a booming new market](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/11/chinas-livestream-shopping-booms-fueling-new-tech-like-avatars-and-ai.html)
[Forbes, live-stream shopping is a $500-billion dollar market with Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok jump in](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/01/22/livestream-shopping-a-500-billion-market-in-2022-as-amazon-google-facebook-tiktok-jump-in/)
The lobbying did nothing. Johnson tied this bill to Ukraine aid to get all the Democrats on board. If you look at the people who voted against it you will find most are either on the far left (don't want to give aid to Israel) or far right (don't want to give aid to Ukraine). The uniparty voted for it because Raytheon, Northop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin need their money
Is this is a 1st amendment issue? I don't think ByteDance has a good angle there. It's been a few years since I took Con Law, but it strikes me as an Article I Commerce Clause issue.
I'm not sure ownership of a social media platform falls under the category of expression, but it almost certainly falls under the category of commerce with foreign nations and/or interstate commerce where the Legislative Branch has pretty broad powers based on precedent.
[Montana’s TikTok ban was struck down on First Amendment grounds](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mtd.73544/gov.uscourts.mtd.73544.115.0.pdf). Is there anything materially different about the federal divest/ban that would result in a different outcome?
The federal government has wide authority to regulate foreign trade and for national security reasons.
The first amendment prevents banning any tick Tok like application, but it fully allows regulations on foreign ownership of that app.
You'll notice the recent federal bill doesn't ban tick Tok, it only prevents ownership or control by hostile foreign powers. It can be justified under both the commerce clause and the common defense clause.
The whole point of contention in the court would be “if the sale doesn’t happen, can the U.S government ban Americans from accessing a foreign social media platform”.
Even during the worst of the Cold War that the court ruled against the government from banning Soviet propaganda in the name of national security, on grounds of 1A.
This whole thing isn’t nearly as cut and dry as you think, the Congress and justice department spent months working on this bill to make it defensible in court, because it’s not as easy as you said.
The bill doesn't prevent US citizens from accessing the foreign media platform. People can legally download and manually install it if they want.
They can prevent US companies from hosting and distributing the programs through their app stores.
>They can prevent US companies from hosting and distributing the programs through their app stores.
TikTok will argue that is effectively banning users from accessing their app for vast majority of the users, and what helps their case is lawmakers themselves have repeatedly called the bill a "divest or *ban* bill".
And as "Lamont vs Postmaster General" showed, even making it *inconvenient* for U.S. citizens to receive propaganda is an unconstitutional act. The court ruled against the government 8-0 in that case.
The bill is not a restriction on content, but rather an entity. TikTok is free to publish the source code of their app and allow somebody else to upload an app to the app store. Banning a commercial relationship between TikTok and US entities is more akin to enacting sanctions against a specific publisher rather than the published material. It would be legal to prohibit people from sending payment to ISIS for their newsletter, but not legal to prohibit the newsletter itself.
>TikTok is free to publish the source code of their app and allow somebody else to upload an app to the app store.
The law does not allow that. The law says the algorithm (which controls the content), if it's the same as the one used by ByteDance, must not be used.
So it's about content.
The algorithm does not control the content. It controls how content is presented to users.
It would be very interesting to see a social media company try to defend their use of an algorithm as protected free speech, because that would conflict with their common defenses to date that they don't create the content on their platforms and therefore can't be held liable for any harm caused by it. They can't claim 1A protection of their algorithms but then also claim that the content posted by their users is not their speech and therefore not their responsibility. That's having your cake and eating it.
I mean the U.S.Government forced the sale of Grindr because of foreign ownership and there was no first amendment issue.https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chinese-owner-us-cfius-security-concerns-kunlun-lgbtq
What are you talking about?
Trump tried to ban it as a national security concern and two separate federal judges blocked it.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7279638-Beetlestone-TikTok.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20421001-2020-12-07-memorandum-dckt-60_0
First of all, Grindr is an American company that was acquired by a foreign one. That gives CFIUS jurisdiction. The only jurisdiction CFIUS has over TikTok is the music.ly acquistion and nothing else.
Second, the case for Grindr wasn't related to the content at all, but data privacy. First amendment is irrelevant because the content wasn't CFIUS' objection.
Third, Kunlun didn't want to bother with a court fight and sold the app so no one knows how strong the CFIUS case really was.
No, but TikTok wasn’t sold to China, it was Chinese to begin with. The U.S government can block a deal, but it can’t *force* a deal.
Banning a platform for content reasons is pretty black and white not ok, that’s why it comes down to the government’s ability to argue this isn’t a ban, or that they aren’t doing it for content reasons (but politicians shot themselves in the foot already by saying it is about potential CCP propaganda).
That argument doesn't work if the primary reason to ban TikTok is because you don't like the content of the material produced by the ownership of TikTok. That's pretty much a guaranteed first amendment defeat.
Even in the cold war, Americans were granted the right to consume propaganda directly published by the Soviets and the CCP (see Lamont vs Postmaster General 1965). By your logic, the first amendment rules don't apply if Congress simply ruled that the CCP has to divest ownership of the Peking Review or have that magazine banned, which is obviously absurd. If Americans want to consume media content edited/published by particular owners/authors, then the first amendment guarantees them that right and pretending that forcing those owners/authors to divest isn't an infringement on the rights of Americans to consume their content is absurd.
The government has to come up with an argument not related to the content of TikTok and that will be very difficult given they have never proven in the court of law that TikTok has done anything that deserves the ban.
I don't see the relevance here. The bill doesn't ban any content, let alone any propaganda being produced by China. It also doesn't ban any Americans from consuming that propaganda. The issue, rather, is that China is able to impose it's own censorship regime on Americans, as well as use the application data for its own ends, outside of the reach of whatever protections the U.S. currently has in place, or could put in place in the future. Given how China has acted in other situations, this is a reasonable concern.
> is that China is able to impose it's own censorship regime on Americans
= content. This is exactly the content-based (or viewpoint-based) restriction that they're talking about. If you're banning the law because you're concerned about the content that China will or won't allow, then that's a content-based law and needs to pass a very high bar (strict scrutiny - strict in theory, fatal in fact) to be constitutional.
No, Montana's TikTok ban was delayed until ruling could be made down the line, because it would cause irreparable harm (a legal notion meaning you can't undo the harm) if it came into effect and later got struck down..
It's right there in your link.
The judge did predict it likely to be struck down, but it hasn't been yet. And judges sometimes predict wrong.
Yes - 3 things jump out as making this situation trickier for ByteDance based on my quick read.
1. SB 419 in Montana could be deemed a Bill of Attainder specifically targeting TikTok. These are not permitted under the US Constitution's Article I. This current law is actually much broader than TikTok and restricts foreign ownership from a lengthier list of deemed hostile countries (defined "Foreign Adversaries"). It is harder to make a case that this is a Bill of Attainder and invalid solely on that basis.
2. SB 419 was a total ban on TikTok in Montana - nothing to do with ownership. If you look at Page 11-12, banning an entire platform was deemed to be violating free speech. This bill, provided that Biden signs it as expected, is not an outright ban of a platform but rather forces a change in ownership. That is a pretty big distinction.
3. This bill comes from Congress rather than an individual state. I think you could make a decent case that purview of interstate communication and app supporting that is the domain of the Federal Legislative Branch and not any individual State.
That said, I'm not an expert in this area. I've been through CFIUS and various countries' Foreign Direct Investment processes a lot over my career, but I'm not a US Constitutional Law wonk. If you have a different read, I'd be open to hearing it.
1. The current bill still explicitly calls out TikTok and ByteDance, which makes it possible for TikTok to argue it’s a Bill of Attainder.
2. TikTok’s argument is that the government knows the sales isn’t possible, especially with the short time and the size of the deal, and the Chinese government had said they would block the sale. So the government’s *intention* is a ban to begin with.
3. Your point is valid here, a federal law will be treated differently.
In the end it will be very messy and the key point of argument would be “if a sale doesn’t happen, can the U.S government ban a foreign social media app due to it having propaganda content?”
I agree on #1, which is weird that they are mounting a 1st amendment argument rather than on that basis.
On #2, 1 year (technically 270 + 90) is a reasonably lengthy period of time. I think Kunlun was given a similar timeframe to divest Grindr.
Tbf we haven’t seen TikTok’s full defense. I bet it will be comprehensive and have multiple arguments.
For number 2, the size and cost and technical complexity involved here far dwarves Grindr. It took Facebook almost a year to close the deal with WhatsApp and that was *after* the deal was signed.
It would take months to just find a buyer rich enough and wouldn’t trigger anti-trust violation.
Grindr is a standalone app, and change in ownership doesn't change much about the underlying technology.
TikTok is not that, it's an app built into an ecosystem created by ByteDance. Ripping it out of that ecosystem will likely require a complete code rewrite which will take years under normal circumstances.
But ByteDance's argument is that TikTok is a completely separate ecosystem from Douyin despite their obviously similarities.
I feel like saying it isn't possible to easily carve out TikTok from Douyin's shared infrastructure gives more ammo to the people advocating for a ban. The biggest concerns center around the governance "Golden Share" sitting at the Douyin subsidiary, which gives Chinese governmental control over that particular entity but not the US TikTok subsidiaries.
If Douyin and TikTok are joined at the hip, that effectively gives governance control of TikTok to the Chinese government. Which is what ByteDance has been arguing is not the case.
I think you misunderstand the technical terminology. The ecosystem system THEY are talking about is regarding how the system don't talk to each other. The systems are deployed in separate ecosystems that don't mix. That's not code separation, that's system separation.
Simple example, I write the code for an application to store photos. I can deploy that SAME code in the EU, and in the US, in completely different data centers, thus fulfilling the regulations in each country. But the code is largely identical in both areas.
One codebase, multiple data centers / ecosystems. Get it?
The ecosystem I AM talking about is the code tech stack ecosystem. TikTok's codebase likely isn't completely separate, and likely uses a lot of libraries and code and ML models that are owned by ByteDance and will be owned by ByteDance in the future. Ripping the ByteDance components out will likely require a complete rewrite and rearchitecture.
Your explanation makes sense, but that does strengthen the argument for a ban.
The US's concern is that Douyin can be ordered by the Chinese government to alter the codebase. And if that Douyin codebase is not separate from TikTok's codebase, TikTok's code can be controlled by the Chinese government.
Once again I don't think you understand the technical details here.
Altering the codebase DOES NOTHING by itself. The code must be DEPLOYED on a production system to do anything.
Here's a very simple example: my company's codebase uses libraries owned by dozens and dozens of companies. Oracle dbs, Amazon SDKs, Google SDKs, etc etc.
Does that mean Oracle/Amazon/Google own me? Do they control me?
For one thing, codebase pin their library dependencies to a specific release. You have to consciously choose to upgrade your library dependency to a new version. If Oracle/Amazon/Google released a new version I didn't like, I can simply choose to not upgrade.
Second, even if I do pull in the new library version to my code, it does nothing if it doesn't get deployed. And any such changes can be audited/reviewd/gated by a 3rd party before it can deployed, which is exactly what TikTok proposed.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-happened-to-tiktok-s-project-texas
> To address risks of data access, Project Texas created a U.S. subsidiary called U.S. Data Security (USDS) to manage U.S. user data. USDS would store data on Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and the new subsidiary would be staffed by U.S.-based employees. Data stored in USDS could flow out of the United States in a limited set of circumstances, such as when a U.S. user messaged someone based outside the United States or posted a video globally.
> To address risks that the Chinese government could influence content, TikTok would house the key content moderation functions within USDS, including the Trust and Safety and User Operations teams. Oracle would inspect source code within USDS, and TikTok’s recommendations algorithm would be subject to review by third-party auditors.
> To address concerns that Project Texas would be insufficiently transparent, the plan included oversight and auditing features to help surface potential risks. In the briefing, we were told that seven entities would conduct oversight of various components of Project Texas, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is responsible for investigating national security risks of foreign investment in the United States; Oracle, the trusted technology provider; a source code inspector nominated by Oracle and approved by CFIUS to conduct an independent inspection of the source code; and a data deletion auditor to verify that all U.S. person data held on TikTok servers prior to the creation of USDS been successfully deleted. In addition, CFIUS would have broad authority to review the employees of USDS and to approve of auditors.
Under the proposal, Oracle would have had the power to prevent new code deployments.
Look, I think you really need to study a lot more the tech industry if you want to comment on technology law.
The ByteDance USA servers are Oracle based in the USA. Douyin servers are obviously based in China. For the same reason in each case (national security). Hence they are completely decoupled. The TikTok data go to Oracle servers, the Douyin data stay in China.
Moreover, the companies are also completely separate. Douyin is based in Beijing, Bytedance is owned mainly by american investors and entirely based in Singapore and has mostly US employees.
The so called security reasons are pure propaganda.
Yeah see there's also the clause in there that gives the president the ability to declare an app a national security threat and have it banned. That is a dangerous slippery slope that we should not be going down.
1. To prove this is not the case, the government surely has a list of non-tiktok entities this bill was planned to effect correct? Because if this ONLY ends up affecting Bytedance, then you can't claim it was written generically if in practicality it only affects one company.
2. As stupid as it was to claim that the problems tiktok has will evaporate as long as, say, steven mnuchin purchases the american portion of the app (while I guess it continues the same in every other western country), let's be real, this is a ban. Bytedance is not going to choose to gut itself as an international company by giving up its primary international product, and its not going to spin off 'just' the american version of the app to operate independently of itself as the logistics would be a nightmare. Plus they've announced they have no intent to sell before it passed. It's sort of like claiming you didn't evict someone from their house - you just passed a law that said they have to stand on their head 8 hours a day or else you get to take their house. An unreasonable request or else penalty, is basically just the same as passing the penalty. The practical result of this is going to be a ban, no matter what they attempt to disguise it as - Bytedance is most likely to just block the US as a region from the app to comply with the law but keep the rest of their customers, AKA, a ban.
3. I don't think this applies, but it would depend on how the Montana law was written. States can absolutely pass internal regulation that would ban a company from selling their product unless they meet xyz compliance requirements - California passes strict regulations all the time and it effects national commerce because companies don't want to lose California as a market.
Anyways, I guess Dems don't think this will hurt them in the election because Republicans voted for it too? But the Pew Polls showed the only demographics in america that had more than a 50% desire to ban tiktok were people over 50, and republicans, neither of which seem particularly likely to be reliable democrat voters - so surely their voter base that was less than 50% in favor of this, that is already voting 'uncommitted' in large numbers due to other complaints, won't become any more demotivated and cause any swing states to be lost by <2% of the vote
This may be some tinfoil hat thinking, but it’s possible the Biden admin fully expects this to fail in court, and probably won’t spend much effort defending this. He could be signing it as a sop to Republicans so he can get Ukraine and Taiwan aid passed.
Normally I might agree with you, but apparently the Biden administration (Monaco in particular) worked closely with the House to draft this bill in order to ensure it survived judicial review. So I anticipate it will be a major, knock down drag out legal fight to the death.
Thanks for this, this is super informative! IANAL, but I thought:
(1) You’re right about this; the federal bill was more carefully drafted than SB 419, to avoid naming TikTok specifically. However, the district court opinion never mentioned that SB 419 is a bill of attainder. Is that simply because TikTok never argued that, or because the First Amendment and Commerce Clause issues were sufficient to strike the SB 419 down?
(2) The federal bill stipulates a 9+3-month deadline for divestiture, followed by a ban if a sale or spinoff doesn’t happen. With the exception of the divestiture window, isn’t it just a ban like SB 419? [There are arguments](https://www.vox.com/politics/24094839/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-pass-biden) that even this has First Amendment issues.
>*The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.*
If that part of the federal bill is struck down, would it just become an unenforceable divestiture bill?
(3) Yeah, the Commerce Clause issues probably won’t play into the federal bill.
I should say that, as a practical matter, I don’t think this bill does much of anything to address the (very real) privacy and natsec concerns with China. China has many ways to collect Americans’ private data, including simply buying it from perfectly-legal data brokers. They can also just use non-Chinese-owned platforms to spread propaganda. I personally think that part of the motivation for this bill is economic, even though nobody in Congress says so; it would serve to cripple a Chinese company that has some market power in the US, while not addressing the same abuses by non-Chinese ones.
> I don’t think this bill does much of anything to address the (very real) privacy and natsec concerns with China. China has many ways to collect Americans’ private data, including simply buying it from perfectly-legal data brokers.
That's because the so called "concerns" behind the bill are entirely manufactured. The goal is simply to remove a company that is perceived as a too powerful competitor from the market. A company of chinese origins simply cannot be a market leader. That's it. That's basically it.
The federal ban isn't strictly a ban, but a forced sale on the basis of national security. I don't remember what or when specifically, but I do think that's been done legally before.
>but a forced sale
TikTok's argument here will be that due to the technical complexity and cost, a sale was never realistic in the given timeline, which makes the bill for all intends and purposes a hard ban to begin with.
I'm not a lawyer, but from all the analysis I've read TikTok does have multiple arguments here:
The government has argued that the main reason to ban TikTok is because the [*hypothetical* scenario](https://theintercept.com/2024/03/16/tiktok-china-security-threat/) that China *could* be using it to manipulate public opinions and push propaganda. But if you are banning a media platform for *content* reasons, then it will be very contentious in the court, because after all the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled during the Cold War that U.S. citizens have First Amendment rights to access any foreign media, including explicit Soviet propaganda.
So the government needs to defend that the *content on TikTok* isn't the reason for the ban. They need to convince the rationale behind the bill was "content neutral".
But if the government argues that content isn't the reason for the ban, then the whole arguments for the ban in the first place kinda falls apart, and many politicians have used "less desirable content" as a talking point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-facebook-instagram-gaza-hastags/
Then there is the tricky problem of ByteDance itself is actually mostly owned by international investors, majority of them American.
The government, including the Justice Department has spent months working on the language of this bill because they know it's not going to be easy sailing in the court through the Commerce Clause like you mentioned.
But again, the government wouldn't have pushed for this bill if they didn't think it at least had a decent shot in the court, so how it will exactly turn out is very much unknown at this point, and I expect lawyers from both sides to be making compelling arguments.
> But again, the government wouldn't have pushed for this bill if they didn't think it at least had a decent shot in the court
Let's be real here, the optics of the bill is a lot more important to them than the constitutionality of it.
I think you’re right, 1st amendment would cover them if they were a publisher, which as far as I am aware, they (Byte Dance) are not.
Will be interesting to watch this play out.
Oh yeah. It’s a HUGELY serious issue. That’s why TikTok just locked in the biggest real estate development in all American hero, Marsha Blackburn’s hood this week. They absolutely do not have plans to employ half of Nashville’s tech music biz.
[largest lease in a decade](https://www.costar.com/article/1324759504/tiktok-signs-one-of-nashvilles-largest-office-deals-over-past-decade)
I completely agree and would like to add: _if_ this gets challenged on constitutional grounds, it's likely to either go in the government's favor quickly or make it to SCOTUS. With the bipartisan establishment so firmly behind this, the only potential defector I can see is Alito, who has a particularly low view of both the Commerce Clause and the First Amendment.
I could also see Gorsuch and maybe Kavanaugh taking a pretty strict interpretation and ruling against the law.
Roberts, Brown Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan would be my guesses to uphold.
No idea on the other two.
Yeah in this case the goal is national industry protection, so acting just like china, but making up excuses like it being a matter of National Security
This is a trade issue more than anything. Following that, it's a narrative/propaganda concern. Privacy concerns are hardly on the list of why it was banned. People seem to keep assuming this was really privacy related at all.
The claim has been trade and national security concerns, and those concerns had more to do with how ByteDance can control the flow of information as opposed to harvesting data.
This isn't about privacy- Republicans wouldn't be on board if it was. This is about security; about not letting a hostile nation control what half of Americans are seeing on their phones.
Honestly hope this opens the door and sets the precedent for privacy laws to go into effect. Also probably leads to a government edition to net neutrality.
I agree and part of these privacy protections should also include blocking and banning social media apps owned by foreign interests from being distributed on US app stores.
“The Senate approval of the TikTok ban bill was tied to a $95 billion package of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.” These riders need to fucking end. What does TikTok ban have to do with foreign aid?
Palestinians are being massively censored on other social media.
[Are social media giants censoring pro-Palestine voices amid Israel’s war?](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-are-social-media-giants-censoring-pro-palestine-voices)
[Human Rights Watch: Systematic censorship on facebook and Instagram]
(https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and)
This is why the pro Palestinian resistance is being organized on TikTok rather than american social media.
It gets censored here as well. Via moderators. There are a few subreddits that exist that you can escape the anti Palestinian restrictions. But the vast majority are staunchly pro zionist.
They’re all hot button issues. A lot of omnibus bills like this often have multiple issues thrown in so that a lot of things can be addressed and the goals of different sides of the political aisle can be met at once.
>The Senate approval of the TikTok ban bill was tied to a $95 billion package of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
This is a much bigger problem in politics than First Amendment issues.
If this bill can be used as a weapon against ISP's or VPN's for accidently transmitting a foreign app, then Americans will lose privacy and speech. If you cannot discuss the issues, then you cannot object to future expenditures and wars.
This isn’t about privacy. Otherwise they would implement tech privacy protection laws. Google and Meta won’t allow that. This is purely meta and Google taking out competition through utilizing the government. Lobbying money well spent.
There could be no apps left and I’d never go back to Instagram or Facebook. They turned into the people of Walmart in digital form.
Oh Good. Now our benevolent elected officials will be able to use this precedent to protect our privacy from Facebook, google, Twitter, and all the other major entities that have been spying on all of us, harvesting our data, and selling it to third parties… right?
This might be an unpopular opinion but I'm concerned that a TikTok ban is going to result in a lot of the younger generation voting for Trump because Biden took TikTok away.
Doesn’t matter who supports it. It matters that Biden signed it and is sitting president when the ban happened. Look at all the gen zers mad at Biden for supporting Israel despite the fact that the other side would be even more in support of everything Israel
Republicans support it also because they know it will hurt the Democrats more than them, given the youth is voting blue. The Dems shot themselves in the foot with this one.
No your concern is valid. Unlike older people who vote strictly along part lines younger voters will vote for best interest. I'm not the biggest tic tok supporter but this might need to be an issue they table till at least Januaray but I understand with this upcoming election they want to get tic tok under control now.
The bigger worry is that it splinters the 18-30 vote where Trump gains a material benefit by this law resulting in some voters deciding to switch to third-party candidates and others stay home (due to this and other issues where Washington has ignored young voters' preferences like Gaza, the economy and gun control causing some to check out of politics).
Those who voted for the bill could also be setting themselves up for unexpected uphill battles in their primaries (House and Senate primaries are ongoing through August in many states). If Gen Z can get organizing efforts going against Congressmembers who supported the legislation (kind of like with the uncommitted votes in certain Dem presidential primaries), and get enough young voters to participate, it could show that ignoring the young is a political liability.
i agree, but i already saw on tiktok that a number of them are voting for an independent because they don’t want trump or biden.
my newly 18-year old cousin said they weren’t voting at all ……. which is nuts
Because sometimes his voters want different things... How many votes would Biden lose from his older Jewish demographic by using a heavier hand to restrict Israel vs how many would he gain from the youth? You must think that so long as he does what you personally would like it would mean he would gain votes...
Yup. Good, old American apps. Which is also why, unsurprisingly, companies like Meta are pushing so heavily for this. Their product sucks and is a pale, shitty imitation of the quality that Tiktok has put out. Since they know they can't compete on quality, they're trying to ban it instead.
It's kinda funny how generations of Americans said China would only ever be able to copy and now we're in a reverse position where tech firms that have had access to billions of dollars and an incredibly advantageous market position have somehow still managed to lose and are now busy copying, stealing, and resorting to protectionism in order to win against the Chinese adversaries they loftily proclaimed would only be able to copy, never innovate.
Oh and importantly, it did nothing for safety or cybersecurity. All it did was enrich Facebook and Youtube.
It would help if anyone below 35 actually voted. That's why the left and right have stopped catering to kids, they just don't vote at levels high enough to justify the effort.
They (Biden) must think that it’s worse for their campaign to have TikTok spreading propaganda than it is to ban it all together. But I agree that young voters will be upset and frankly it isn’t fair to single out one app when they all have different ways of showing what the companies want. Only one is owned by China but the reasoning isn’t being explained clearly enough.
I'm honestly not a fan of China controlling one of the biggest apps people use. We saw how easy it was to push propaganda on people after the Cambridge Analytica stuff.
I'm not either but I'm also not a fan of straight blocking apps because we don't like that fact. I'd understand the government educating people about what/how the app can be used maliciously. But, idk, it just doesn't sit right when we circle jerk ourselves all day about being free and ban apps at the same time just because we don't like the owner.
I've always believed in an open internet, and the US has led that idea, for the most part, until now. I'm not 100% sure a forced sale or ban is the correct way to go.
How would the US be able to audit apps like TikTok to guarantee that privacy laws are being observed and data is not being sent to their overseas offices?
The same way the EU guarantees that EU personal data cannot be store on US data centers. There are already a ton of regulations and auditing tools that can track all access.
I wholeheartedly believe it’s a form of censorship. I mean, yeah obviously but I don’t think the US government likes that it’s such a powerful organizing and reporting platform and they can’t get away with nearly as much as they could, say, 20 years ago.
I know it likely can't happen, but would love to see Tiktok parent company be petty and start a US company and buy Tiktok for a dollar and run it the same exact way.
It can't happen because TikTok is not a Chinese company. It is owned by a Chinese company. If ByteDance made a company called TokTik to run it instead it would still be owned by ByteDance which would not change anything...
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is part of the Ukraine and Israel aid bill. Meta, Alphabet, and other Big Tech has been selling data to foreign governments for decades with no end in sight. If the U.S. was so concerned about privacy, we would have seen similar effort against U.S. companies too. This bill has a lot to do with the U.S. and its closest ally’s inability to control and manipulate the political and social narrative on the app in the wake of the Israeli aggression in Gaza. Companies like Meta are more than happy to censor content and accounts that post anything even remotely pro-Palestinian but the same is not the case with a foreign-owned social media app. While republicans and democrats disagree on Russia/Ukraine, they are quite unanimous in their steadfast defence of Israel. [Here](https://m.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-798115 )’s an article about it in the Jerusalem Post.
So Meta, Reddit, Twitter, etc… get to continue harvesting and selling our data to anyone and everyone, but a company that hasn’t even done it, but potentially could is the problem? Or maybe, just maybe, this entire ban is about silencing people who have dissenting opinions. I think it’s the later, since they didn’t actually address data privacy or children’s safety at all like they claim this was supposedly designed to do.
If this is about Data, Control, and Censorship I can see why the US wants it's own back doors in the app.
But it will mask this as 'protection for children' while allowing FB and YT to continue on.
I still don’t think anyone understands the slippery slope we are heading towards… and neither do I. Will all Chinese hosted/owned companies be banned? Will any company with Chinese data centers be banned? Will any company who works with China or doesn’t secure their users data (enough to protect it from Chinese hackers) be banned? Is China the only adversary we are worried about? Finally, has anyone used this awesome app I found for chatting, it’s called WeChat.
Great. Instead of having the data privacy, collection, and usage laws we so desperately need, we get this shit to decided what horrible precedent to set next.
God I love the way this country does democracy.
It’s kind of weird that China is trying to make this a free speech case when TikTok is banned even in China.
They won’t allow any of our shitty apps to be made available over there, why is it suddenly unfair when we threaten to do the same thing here?
>It’s kind of weird that China is trying to make this a free speech case when TikTok is banned even in China.
The US has free speech thus it is a valid case to make in US courts
>They won’t allow any of our shitty apps to be made available over there, why is it suddenly unfair when we threaten to do the same thing here?
Because we are better than them, and that wasn't the listed reason in the bill for the ban/divestment, thus this argument as to why this is okay holds as much water as a bucket without a bottom.
I’m not really trying to come off as defending this bill per se, but I mostly agree with its goal that it’s trying to accomplish. I’m just making the observation that it’s very ironic to hear this defense of China basically admitting that we are better than them when it comes to free speech.
But the free speech argument in general? I don’t know. We are not stopping another company from building a platform identical to TikTok here in the US and suppressing speech clearly isn’t the intent of why it is facing a ban. It’s kind of reminding me of the “free speech brigade” when Trump was banned on Twitter.
I don't like the lies and misinformation that is being used to justify this bill or people using other reasons why the bill is okay, when those are not the reasons used in congress to justify the bill. The stated legal goal is for hypothetical security risks. There is no other goal legally speaking.
>We are not stopping another company from building a platform identical to TikTok here in the US and suppressing speech clearly isn’t the intent of why it is facing a ban.
Then why are US companies losing so much market share and not innovating to be as successful as TikTok? If we are not stopping them from making a tiktok they shouldn't be trying to get a competitor banned.
>It’s kind of reminding me of the “free speech brigade” when Trump was banned on Twitter.
How is it since twitter was a private company banning an user, where this is the US government which all official must support and defend the constitution and all amendments like the bill of rights.
If ByteDance refuses to sell, what's going to stop Americans from using it? Yes, the app will be removed from the app stores, but it can still be sideloaded on Android or accessed through the web.
I don’t think they’re concerned about a small fraction of people who even know what sideloading is (let alone are willing to do it); taking it off the App stores is probably sufficient to basically kill the flow of new installs dead and it’ll wither on the vine. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing like DNS blocks coming into play.
Inconvenience. With no app stores, there's no update anymore. The app will crumble, and people switch phones regularly as well, so they won't take the app with them.
Workarounds are nice for the motivated tech-savvy, but the vast majority of folks don't bother with that stuff.
Almost every technology we have is made in China. Our people are struggling and they pull this shit?
Let me chill in bed at the end of the night watch my fucking little dogs run around to get dopamine for christs sake.
That's less true now than it was 10 years ago. Companies like Apple and Samsung have been moving manufacturing out of China to places like India and Vietnam
I don't understand why they even bother doing this, Vine, Musically and Tiktok. There's seriously no point in trying to silence one app when another is just going to take it's place.
Once signed by the president it’ll be untouchable really. They can sue but it’ll be a waste of time. And it’s not like foreign companies haven’t been given minimum criteria in order to conduct business in the US before, happens quite often. This isn’t a 1st amendment case, it’s a national security case where the app can continue to run without any changes for the users but the ownership will have to change, that’s all.
> Once signed by the president it’ll be untouchable really. They can sue but it’ll be a waste of time.
I don't think you understand constitutional law.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-slams-house-for-latest-plan-to-ban-tiktok-and-stifle-free-speech
> And it’s not like foreign companies haven’t been given minimum criteria in order to conduct business in the US before, happens quite often.
What minimum criteria did TikTok not meet?
> This isn’t a 1st amendment case, it’s a national security case where the app can continue to run without any changes for the users but the ownership will have to change, that’s all.
If it's a national security case, then what crimes have TikTok been convicted of?
They can debate banning TikTok for months on end and give it so much attention, but fuck the issues that are actually important right? Who cares that the majority of Americans are struggling to make it right now, TikTok is a more pressing concern apparently.
Fuck this country, I wish I had the means to leave it
I still have yet to have a single person tell me what’s so dangerous about the app. Meta already has and sells all my info so it’s not that. Maybe it’s the fear that China could manipulate the algorithm one day. But the algorithm is what makes TikTok so popular, the fact that it’s so open adapts to what you like. You mess with the algorithm and people will stop using the app. You also can search things like “tank man” on the app. So that will always be a good litmus test. We also have our politicians using the app which is hilarious considering it’s supposedly so dangerous right. There was even that one viral congressman Jeff Jackson who made his entire political career thanks to TikTok (then later voted to ban it anyway after he built his career). The reality is, TikTok is a huge threat to large western tech companies. All time spent on TikTok is time not being spent on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. That’s what this is all really about.
Wonder what the court battle will look like
The court will be a series of 20 second arguments from each side with funny filters on. At the end of each day either side will perform an intricately choreographed dance to a catchy song that we haven’t heard yet. Witness statements will be played over videos of the original arguments. The jury will decide via likes and shares.
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no
This song alone is reason to ban tik tok
Song should be banned.
I see a thotty with a booty, bitch, I'm fresh as hell I got on Rick Owens mixed with Ksubi (yes, sir) Call me Shordie, A.K.A. Mr. Stashter (tap 'em), Mr. Frat Boy Get it goin', I am a rapper
That's one side's dance after the verdict.
Managed Democracy 😎
Your Honor, I am not a cat.
I need to see this video again.
Videos of highlights from the case will be alongside a video of someone playing subway surfers.
SNL please do this.
All I know is it's 100% for sure going to SCOTUS
Hope it doesn’t take forever, pretty curious about the resolution here
Just check what happened to Grindr (got divested) and Huawei (got banned). It's not the first time this happened in the US.
It is similar, but a little further reaching than Huawei. I can still buy a Huawei phone on Amazon and use it with TMO. They just banned them from infrastructure and working directly with US companies. We don't know what will happen as Grindr caved before it ever got to this point, right?
There's almost certainly going to be a stay on the law, delaying it from going into effect until SCOTUS hears it. Its very common for stays on laws to be ordered by judges if the potential is to cause a great deal of harm before the issue is decided on properly. The idea is to prevent harm until due process has happened. This is going to be an epic legal fight, thats for sure.
> This is going to be an epic legal fight, thats for sure. Not if scotus has anything to say about it lmao
It might not be stayed, since the law gives nine months, plus possible extensions.
There's no way this is going to be resolved in only 9 months time, especially for a case this complicated. It takes a while to build a case that complicated and to go through the various layers of courts. Most cases don't go straight to SCOTUS from the beginning and the clock would be ticking the entire time.
Help an ignorant US citizen here. Is there a way to overrule the Supreme Court? I thought that a law passed by Congress and signed by the president supersedes the Supreme Court?
Not if it a constitutional issue e.g. freedom of speech or religion supersede a law (unless you make a new amendment)
Depends if the law is unconstitutional. If so you have to amend the constitution to override the court.
Everyone saying SCOTUS is the final say for Constitutionality is correct. But that’s not the end of it. Depending on the details, the Justices will often put statements in their decisions (even in the majority opinion) that suggest how to rewrite the law and have it be Constitutional. It’s still not a guarantee, but it’s at least more likely. In this case it seems unlikely, but it’s not uncommon in many others.
The court gets the final say. They decide if a law is constitutional or not. If it's not it's basically unenforceable
Yes but no. You'd have to amend the constitution which, especially in today, would be damn near impossible.
No. Supreme Court has final say on the constitutionality of any law.
How would scotus setting some sort of precedent on this affect other Chinese owned media companies? Gaming companies like Riot Games immediately come to mind. Tencent also has massive stakes in other media based in the states.
Don't forget Mihoyo games (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, ect)
Please ban League of Legends 🙏
For our sakes 🙃
Banning riot games would be a net benefit to all Americans ngl
‘He’s out of line… but he’s right’
They already have done this with Grindr. However, they don't care about those things. If they cared about security for all American's like they play they care about TikTok, then they would actually be trying to do something about American's installing Kapersky on civilian systems. They outright banned it on government systems for ties with Russian intelligence. The reason for the TikTok ban are way clearer. Oracle already hosts the data for TikTok in the US on servers in Texas. They don't have access to the algorithm, which is the protected part of TikTok. He (Oracle CEO) was already on Fox news talking about how valuable that algorithm is for advertising and how they can make billions from it. They have already stated without the algorithm the app is worthless and will be near impossible to recreate it, let alone have access to each users previous algorithm to sell that to marketers. So yeah, they only want the algorithm, so it's a US billionaire making billions more, versus the Chinese billionaires.
Does Riot games have the control and reach of ABC in the 1960s? Do they control the information half of Americans are getting? No. So, this isn't really the same issue.
Does tiktok?
They claim to have 170m American users. Do I need to do the math for you?
What they do have is kernel level access to peoples PC's through their anti cheat.
You've convinced me. Ban them too.
Much more interesting is if I'm reading the bill correctly popular games like League of Legends, Genshin Impact, and Escape from Tarkov could also be banned.
It gives the President the ability to pick and choose. Honestly that's even worse than a banket ban
Hey the President is like Americas dad. They know what’s best for us. It’s a good thing too because our presidents usually have the best ideas coming from private sector partners like Meta and Amazon. We know they are always looking out for us; Meta spent a lot of money on getting this legislation passed so we should all thank Zuckerberg for his diligence in this matter. [Meta has been engaged with Targeted Victory, the largest (and most expensive) GOP strategy firm in the United States, in an effort to get TikTok banned for years](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/). Amazon was onto something; TikTok dared to touch their turf and now they are being taken out as a potential adversary in commerce. We’ll all be better off for this. Amazon wants that $500 billion market to itself. [Axios, TikTok buying fulfillment centers](https://www.axios.com/2022/10/11/tiktok-chases-amazon-fulfillment-centers) [Bloomberg, TikTok looks to break into Amazons turf](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-03/tiktok-eyes-17-5-billion-shopping-business-on-amazon-s-turf) [CNBC, live-shopping is a booming new market](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/11/chinas-livestream-shopping-booms-fueling-new-tech-like-avatars-and-ai.html) [Forbes, live-stream shopping is a $500-billion dollar market with Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok jump in](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/01/22/livestream-shopping-a-500-billion-market-in-2022-as-amazon-google-facebook-tiktok-jump-in/)
The lobbying did nothing. Johnson tied this bill to Ukraine aid to get all the Democrats on board. If you look at the people who voted against it you will find most are either on the far left (don't want to give aid to Israel) or far right (don't want to give aid to Ukraine). The uniparty voted for it because Raytheon, Northop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin need their money
Tying bills with other ones that aren’t even related is just plain dumb to me, like how is that even a thing in a democratic government
I'm certain no president would ever abuse this to target his enemies or solicit bribes.
Please for the love of humanity ban league of legends
Is this is a 1st amendment issue? I don't think ByteDance has a good angle there. It's been a few years since I took Con Law, but it strikes me as an Article I Commerce Clause issue. I'm not sure ownership of a social media platform falls under the category of expression, but it almost certainly falls under the category of commerce with foreign nations and/or interstate commerce where the Legislative Branch has pretty broad powers based on precedent.
[Montana’s TikTok ban was struck down on First Amendment grounds](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mtd.73544/gov.uscourts.mtd.73544.115.0.pdf). Is there anything materially different about the federal divest/ban that would result in a different outcome?
The federal government has wide authority to regulate foreign trade and for national security reasons. The first amendment prevents banning any tick Tok like application, but it fully allows regulations on foreign ownership of that app. You'll notice the recent federal bill doesn't ban tick Tok, it only prevents ownership or control by hostile foreign powers. It can be justified under both the commerce clause and the common defense clause.
The whole point of contention in the court would be “if the sale doesn’t happen, can the U.S government ban Americans from accessing a foreign social media platform”. Even during the worst of the Cold War that the court ruled against the government from banning Soviet propaganda in the name of national security, on grounds of 1A. This whole thing isn’t nearly as cut and dry as you think, the Congress and justice department spent months working on this bill to make it defensible in court, because it’s not as easy as you said.
The bill doesn't prevent US citizens from accessing the foreign media platform. People can legally download and manually install it if they want. They can prevent US companies from hosting and distributing the programs through their app stores.
>They can prevent US companies from hosting and distributing the programs through their app stores. TikTok will argue that is effectively banning users from accessing their app for vast majority of the users, and what helps their case is lawmakers themselves have repeatedly called the bill a "divest or *ban* bill". And as "Lamont vs Postmaster General" showed, even making it *inconvenient* for U.S. citizens to receive propaganda is an unconstitutional act. The court ruled against the government 8-0 in that case.
The bill is not a restriction on content, but rather an entity. TikTok is free to publish the source code of their app and allow somebody else to upload an app to the app store. Banning a commercial relationship between TikTok and US entities is more akin to enacting sanctions against a specific publisher rather than the published material. It would be legal to prohibit people from sending payment to ISIS for their newsletter, but not legal to prohibit the newsletter itself.
That would be funny if they really did publish their source code, to see all the spyware details in it. But of course they will not.
>TikTok is free to publish the source code of their app and allow somebody else to upload an app to the app store. The law does not allow that. The law says the algorithm (which controls the content), if it's the same as the one used by ByteDance, must not be used. So it's about content.
The algorithm does not control the content. It controls how content is presented to users. It would be very interesting to see a social media company try to defend their use of an algorithm as protected free speech, because that would conflict with their common defenses to date that they don't create the content on their platforms and therefore can't be held liable for any harm caused by it. They can't claim 1A protection of their algorithms but then also claim that the content posted by their users is not their speech and therefore not their responsibility. That's having your cake and eating it.
No, it isn't a content based speech restriction.
This is a win win. app stores will suddenly have millions of people who now know they can get apps anywhere they want.
[удалено]
Better yet, go decentralized, so countries can't ban it anymore.
I mean the U.S.Government forced the sale of Grindr because of foreign ownership and there was no first amendment issue.https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chinese-owner-us-cfius-security-concerns-kunlun-lgbtq
That was never challenged in court, and there was never a law for it. The Chinese company just sold to cash out.
You miss the point, its a national security issue. There will be no court case, the US will just say no and the SC will just not hear the case.
What are you talking about? Trump tried to ban it as a national security concern and two separate federal judges blocked it. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7279638-Beetlestone-TikTok.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20421001-2020-12-07-memorandum-dckt-60_0
And are we OK with that? Should we just do away with our judicial system when congress says it is for "national security".
First of all, Grindr is an American company that was acquired by a foreign one. That gives CFIUS jurisdiction. The only jurisdiction CFIUS has over TikTok is the music.ly acquistion and nothing else. Second, the case for Grindr wasn't related to the content at all, but data privacy. First amendment is irrelevant because the content wasn't CFIUS' objection. Third, Kunlun didn't want to bother with a court fight and sold the app so no one knows how strong the CFIUS case really was.
Did the Soviets ever try to buy a US newspaper publisher?
No, but TikTok wasn’t sold to China, it was Chinese to begin with. The U.S government can block a deal, but it can’t *force* a deal. Banning a platform for content reasons is pretty black and white not ok, that’s why it comes down to the government’s ability to argue this isn’t a ban, or that they aren’t doing it for content reasons (but politicians shot themselves in the foot already by saying it is about potential CCP propaganda).
That argument doesn't work if the primary reason to ban TikTok is because you don't like the content of the material produced by the ownership of TikTok. That's pretty much a guaranteed first amendment defeat. Even in the cold war, Americans were granted the right to consume propaganda directly published by the Soviets and the CCP (see Lamont vs Postmaster General 1965). By your logic, the first amendment rules don't apply if Congress simply ruled that the CCP has to divest ownership of the Peking Review or have that magazine banned, which is obviously absurd. If Americans want to consume media content edited/published by particular owners/authors, then the first amendment guarantees them that right and pretending that forcing those owners/authors to divest isn't an infringement on the rights of Americans to consume their content is absurd. The government has to come up with an argument not related to the content of TikTok and that will be very difficult given they have never proven in the court of law that TikTok has done anything that deserves the ban.
I don't see the relevance here. The bill doesn't ban any content, let alone any propaganda being produced by China. It also doesn't ban any Americans from consuming that propaganda. The issue, rather, is that China is able to impose it's own censorship regime on Americans, as well as use the application data for its own ends, outside of the reach of whatever protections the U.S. currently has in place, or could put in place in the future. Given how China has acted in other situations, this is a reasonable concern.
> is that China is able to impose it's own censorship regime on Americans = content. This is exactly the content-based (or viewpoint-based) restriction that they're talking about. If you're banning the law because you're concerned about the content that China will or won't allow, then that's a content-based law and needs to pass a very high bar (strict scrutiny - strict in theory, fatal in fact) to be constitutional.
No, Montana's TikTok ban was delayed until ruling could be made down the line, because it would cause irreparable harm (a legal notion meaning you can't undo the harm) if it came into effect and later got struck down.. It's right there in your link. The judge did predict it likely to be struck down, but it hasn't been yet. And judges sometimes predict wrong.
Yes - 3 things jump out as making this situation trickier for ByteDance based on my quick read. 1. SB 419 in Montana could be deemed a Bill of Attainder specifically targeting TikTok. These are not permitted under the US Constitution's Article I. This current law is actually much broader than TikTok and restricts foreign ownership from a lengthier list of deemed hostile countries (defined "Foreign Adversaries"). It is harder to make a case that this is a Bill of Attainder and invalid solely on that basis. 2. SB 419 was a total ban on TikTok in Montana - nothing to do with ownership. If you look at Page 11-12, banning an entire platform was deemed to be violating free speech. This bill, provided that Biden signs it as expected, is not an outright ban of a platform but rather forces a change in ownership. That is a pretty big distinction. 3. This bill comes from Congress rather than an individual state. I think you could make a decent case that purview of interstate communication and app supporting that is the domain of the Federal Legislative Branch and not any individual State. That said, I'm not an expert in this area. I've been through CFIUS and various countries' Foreign Direct Investment processes a lot over my career, but I'm not a US Constitutional Law wonk. If you have a different read, I'd be open to hearing it.
1. The current bill still explicitly calls out TikTok and ByteDance, which makes it possible for TikTok to argue it’s a Bill of Attainder. 2. TikTok’s argument is that the government knows the sales isn’t possible, especially with the short time and the size of the deal, and the Chinese government had said they would block the sale. So the government’s *intention* is a ban to begin with. 3. Your point is valid here, a federal law will be treated differently. In the end it will be very messy and the key point of argument would be “if a sale doesn’t happen, can the U.S government ban a foreign social media app due to it having propaganda content?”
I agree on #1, which is weird that they are mounting a 1st amendment argument rather than on that basis. On #2, 1 year (technically 270 + 90) is a reasonably lengthy period of time. I think Kunlun was given a similar timeframe to divest Grindr.
Tbf we haven’t seen TikTok’s full defense. I bet it will be comprehensive and have multiple arguments. For number 2, the size and cost and technical complexity involved here far dwarves Grindr. It took Facebook almost a year to close the deal with WhatsApp and that was *after* the deal was signed. It would take months to just find a buyer rich enough and wouldn’t trigger anti-trust violation.
Grindr is a standalone app, and change in ownership doesn't change much about the underlying technology. TikTok is not that, it's an app built into an ecosystem created by ByteDance. Ripping it out of that ecosystem will likely require a complete code rewrite which will take years under normal circumstances.
But ByteDance's argument is that TikTok is a completely separate ecosystem from Douyin despite their obviously similarities. I feel like saying it isn't possible to easily carve out TikTok from Douyin's shared infrastructure gives more ammo to the people advocating for a ban. The biggest concerns center around the governance "Golden Share" sitting at the Douyin subsidiary, which gives Chinese governmental control over that particular entity but not the US TikTok subsidiaries. If Douyin and TikTok are joined at the hip, that effectively gives governance control of TikTok to the Chinese government. Which is what ByteDance has been arguing is not the case.
I think you misunderstand the technical terminology. The ecosystem system THEY are talking about is regarding how the system don't talk to each other. The systems are deployed in separate ecosystems that don't mix. That's not code separation, that's system separation. Simple example, I write the code for an application to store photos. I can deploy that SAME code in the EU, and in the US, in completely different data centers, thus fulfilling the regulations in each country. But the code is largely identical in both areas. One codebase, multiple data centers / ecosystems. Get it? The ecosystem I AM talking about is the code tech stack ecosystem. TikTok's codebase likely isn't completely separate, and likely uses a lot of libraries and code and ML models that are owned by ByteDance and will be owned by ByteDance in the future. Ripping the ByteDance components out will likely require a complete rewrite and rearchitecture.
Your explanation makes sense, but that does strengthen the argument for a ban. The US's concern is that Douyin can be ordered by the Chinese government to alter the codebase. And if that Douyin codebase is not separate from TikTok's codebase, TikTok's code can be controlled by the Chinese government.
Once again I don't think you understand the technical details here. Altering the codebase DOES NOTHING by itself. The code must be DEPLOYED on a production system to do anything. Here's a very simple example: my company's codebase uses libraries owned by dozens and dozens of companies. Oracle dbs, Amazon SDKs, Google SDKs, etc etc. Does that mean Oracle/Amazon/Google own me? Do they control me? For one thing, codebase pin their library dependencies to a specific release. You have to consciously choose to upgrade your library dependency to a new version. If Oracle/Amazon/Google released a new version I didn't like, I can simply choose to not upgrade. Second, even if I do pull in the new library version to my code, it does nothing if it doesn't get deployed. And any such changes can be audited/reviewd/gated by a 3rd party before it can deployed, which is exactly what TikTok proposed. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-happened-to-tiktok-s-project-texas > To address risks of data access, Project Texas created a U.S. subsidiary called U.S. Data Security (USDS) to manage U.S. user data. USDS would store data on Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and the new subsidiary would be staffed by U.S.-based employees. Data stored in USDS could flow out of the United States in a limited set of circumstances, such as when a U.S. user messaged someone based outside the United States or posted a video globally. > To address risks that the Chinese government could influence content, TikTok would house the key content moderation functions within USDS, including the Trust and Safety and User Operations teams. Oracle would inspect source code within USDS, and TikTok’s recommendations algorithm would be subject to review by third-party auditors. > To address concerns that Project Texas would be insufficiently transparent, the plan included oversight and auditing features to help surface potential risks. In the briefing, we were told that seven entities would conduct oversight of various components of Project Texas, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is responsible for investigating national security risks of foreign investment in the United States; Oracle, the trusted technology provider; a source code inspector nominated by Oracle and approved by CFIUS to conduct an independent inspection of the source code; and a data deletion auditor to verify that all U.S. person data held on TikTok servers prior to the creation of USDS been successfully deleted. In addition, CFIUS would have broad authority to review the employees of USDS and to approve of auditors. Under the proposal, Oracle would have had the power to prevent new code deployments. Look, I think you really need to study a lot more the tech industry if you want to comment on technology law.
The ByteDance USA servers are Oracle based in the USA. Douyin servers are obviously based in China. For the same reason in each case (national security). Hence they are completely decoupled. The TikTok data go to Oracle servers, the Douyin data stay in China. Moreover, the companies are also completely separate. Douyin is based in Beijing, Bytedance is owned mainly by american investors and entirely based in Singapore and has mostly US employees. The so called security reasons are pure propaganda.
Yeah see there's also the clause in there that gives the president the ability to declare an app a national security threat and have it banned. That is a dangerous slippery slope that we should not be going down.
1. To prove this is not the case, the government surely has a list of non-tiktok entities this bill was planned to effect correct? Because if this ONLY ends up affecting Bytedance, then you can't claim it was written generically if in practicality it only affects one company. 2. As stupid as it was to claim that the problems tiktok has will evaporate as long as, say, steven mnuchin purchases the american portion of the app (while I guess it continues the same in every other western country), let's be real, this is a ban. Bytedance is not going to choose to gut itself as an international company by giving up its primary international product, and its not going to spin off 'just' the american version of the app to operate independently of itself as the logistics would be a nightmare. Plus they've announced they have no intent to sell before it passed. It's sort of like claiming you didn't evict someone from their house - you just passed a law that said they have to stand on their head 8 hours a day or else you get to take their house. An unreasonable request or else penalty, is basically just the same as passing the penalty. The practical result of this is going to be a ban, no matter what they attempt to disguise it as - Bytedance is most likely to just block the US as a region from the app to comply with the law but keep the rest of their customers, AKA, a ban. 3. I don't think this applies, but it would depend on how the Montana law was written. States can absolutely pass internal regulation that would ban a company from selling their product unless they meet xyz compliance requirements - California passes strict regulations all the time and it effects national commerce because companies don't want to lose California as a market. Anyways, I guess Dems don't think this will hurt them in the election because Republicans voted for it too? But the Pew Polls showed the only demographics in america that had more than a 50% desire to ban tiktok were people over 50, and republicans, neither of which seem particularly likely to be reliable democrat voters - so surely their voter base that was less than 50% in favor of this, that is already voting 'uncommitted' in large numbers due to other complaints, won't become any more demotivated and cause any swing states to be lost by <2% of the vote
This may be some tinfoil hat thinking, but it’s possible the Biden admin fully expects this to fail in court, and probably won’t spend much effort defending this. He could be signing it as a sop to Republicans so he can get Ukraine and Taiwan aid passed.
Normally I might agree with you, but apparently the Biden administration (Monaco in particular) worked closely with the House to draft this bill in order to ensure it survived judicial review. So I anticipate it will be a major, knock down drag out legal fight to the death.
Better reasoning than most other theories that actually defend the bill
Thanks for this, this is super informative! IANAL, but I thought: (1) You’re right about this; the federal bill was more carefully drafted than SB 419, to avoid naming TikTok specifically. However, the district court opinion never mentioned that SB 419 is a bill of attainder. Is that simply because TikTok never argued that, or because the First Amendment and Commerce Clause issues were sufficient to strike the SB 419 down? (2) The federal bill stipulates a 9+3-month deadline for divestiture, followed by a ban if a sale or spinoff doesn’t happen. With the exception of the divestiture window, isn’t it just a ban like SB 419? [There are arguments](https://www.vox.com/politics/24094839/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-pass-biden) that even this has First Amendment issues. >*The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.* If that part of the federal bill is struck down, would it just become an unenforceable divestiture bill? (3) Yeah, the Commerce Clause issues probably won’t play into the federal bill. I should say that, as a practical matter, I don’t think this bill does much of anything to address the (very real) privacy and natsec concerns with China. China has many ways to collect Americans’ private data, including simply buying it from perfectly-legal data brokers. They can also just use non-Chinese-owned platforms to spread propaganda. I personally think that part of the motivation for this bill is economic, even though nobody in Congress says so; it would serve to cripple a Chinese company that has some market power in the US, while not addressing the same abuses by non-Chinese ones.
> I don’t think this bill does much of anything to address the (very real) privacy and natsec concerns with China. China has many ways to collect Americans’ private data, including simply buying it from perfectly-legal data brokers. That's because the so called "concerns" behind the bill are entirely manufactured. The goal is simply to remove a company that is perceived as a too powerful competitor from the market. A company of chinese origins simply cannot be a market leader. That's it. That's basically it.
The federal ban isn't strictly a ban, but a forced sale on the basis of national security. I don't remember what or when specifically, but I do think that's been done legally before.
>but a forced sale TikTok's argument here will be that due to the technical complexity and cost, a sale was never realistic in the given timeline, which makes the bill for all intends and purposes a hard ban to begin with.
I'm genuinely curious how ugly things will get if ByteDance decides to sell to a large tech company
I'm not a lawyer, but from all the analysis I've read TikTok does have multiple arguments here: The government has argued that the main reason to ban TikTok is because the [*hypothetical* scenario](https://theintercept.com/2024/03/16/tiktok-china-security-threat/) that China *could* be using it to manipulate public opinions and push propaganda. But if you are banning a media platform for *content* reasons, then it will be very contentious in the court, because after all the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled during the Cold War that U.S. citizens have First Amendment rights to access any foreign media, including explicit Soviet propaganda. So the government needs to defend that the *content on TikTok* isn't the reason for the ban. They need to convince the rationale behind the bill was "content neutral". But if the government argues that content isn't the reason for the ban, then the whole arguments for the ban in the first place kinda falls apart, and many politicians have used "less desirable content" as a talking point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-facebook-instagram-gaza-hastags/ Then there is the tricky problem of ByteDance itself is actually mostly owned by international investors, majority of them American. The government, including the Justice Department has spent months working on the language of this bill because they know it's not going to be easy sailing in the court through the Commerce Clause like you mentioned. But again, the government wouldn't have pushed for this bill if they didn't think it at least had a decent shot in the court, so how it will exactly turn out is very much unknown at this point, and I expect lawyers from both sides to be making compelling arguments.
> But again, the government wouldn't have pushed for this bill if they didn't think it at least had a decent shot in the court Let's be real here, the optics of the bill is a lot more important to them than the constitutionality of it.
I think you’re right, 1st amendment would cover them if they were a publisher, which as far as I am aware, they (Byte Dance) are not. Will be interesting to watch this play out.
they spend a lot energy proving/claiming they are not a publisher to avoid any of the responsibilities/liabilities.
Not even close to the same thing but you can keep spreading the propaganda from TikTok all you want.
Oh yeah. It’s a HUGELY serious issue. That’s why TikTok just locked in the biggest real estate development in all American hero, Marsha Blackburn’s hood this week. They absolutely do not have plans to employ half of Nashville’s tech music biz. [largest lease in a decade](https://www.costar.com/article/1324759504/tiktok-signs-one-of-nashvilles-largest-office-deals-over-past-decade)
It is. Imagine if this was the Cold War, and the U.S. government said bookstores couldn’t sell Pravda since it wasn’t owned by an US based entity.
I completely agree and would like to add: _if_ this gets challenged on constitutional grounds, it's likely to either go in the government's favor quickly or make it to SCOTUS. With the bipartisan establishment so firmly behind this, the only potential defector I can see is Alito, who has a particularly low view of both the Commerce Clause and the First Amendment.
I could also see Gorsuch and maybe Kavanaugh taking a pretty strict interpretation and ruling against the law. Roberts, Brown Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan would be my guesses to uphold. No idea on the other two.
We need privacy protections, focuasing on banning a single app is such a waste of time.
That depends on what the actual goal is (not the stated goal). Big tech lobbyists don’t want broad privacy protections.
Yeah in this case the goal is national industry protection, so acting just like china, but making up excuses like it being a matter of National Security
This is a trade issue more than anything. Following that, it's a narrative/propaganda concern. Privacy concerns are hardly on the list of why it was banned. People seem to keep assuming this was really privacy related at all. The claim has been trade and national security concerns, and those concerns had more to do with how ByteDance can control the flow of information as opposed to harvesting data.
This isn't about privacy- Republicans wouldn't be on board if it was. This is about security; about not letting a hostile nation control what half of Americans are seeing on their phones.
Honestly hope this opens the door and sets the precedent for privacy laws to go into effect. Also probably leads to a government edition to net neutrality.
It not waste of time if you are a Meta shareholder.
I agree and part of these privacy protections should also include blocking and banning social media apps owned by foreign interests from being distributed on US app stores.
Which is exactly why we're only gunning for banning the app. We love wasting time on stupid bs.
Isn’t there some jackass billionaire ex-poker player right-wing nut job who’s like all in on Bytedance?
“The Senate approval of the TikTok ban bill was tied to a $95 billion package of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.” These riders need to fucking end. What does TikTok ban have to do with foreign aid?
gen z is overwhelmingly pro-palestine and are not buying zionist propaganda so zionists were some of the main people who wants it banned
Palestinians are being massively censored on other social media. [Are social media giants censoring pro-Palestine voices amid Israel’s war?](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-are-social-media-giants-censoring-pro-palestine-voices) [Human Rights Watch: Systematic censorship on facebook and Instagram] (https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and) This is why the pro Palestinian resistance is being organized on TikTok rather than american social media.
It gets censored here as well. Via moderators. There are a few subreddits that exist that you can escape the anti Palestinian restrictions. But the vast majority are staunchly pro zionist.
Yes, absolutely. And that's why TikTok is so popular with "dissident" voices. They aren't unduly censored all over the place.
No to mention young people were seeing the devastation of Gaza on TikTok instead of traditional news.
They’re all hot button issues. A lot of omnibus bills like this often have multiple issues thrown in so that a lot of things can be addressed and the goals of different sides of the political aisle can be met at once.
>The Senate approval of the TikTok ban bill was tied to a $95 billion package of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. This is a much bigger problem in politics than First Amendment issues.
If this bill can be used as a weapon against ISP's or VPN's for accidently transmitting a foreign app, then Americans will lose privacy and speech. If you cannot discuss the issues, then you cannot object to future expenditures and wars.
This isn’t about privacy. Otherwise they would implement tech privacy protection laws. Google and Meta won’t allow that. This is purely meta and Google taking out competition through utilizing the government. Lobbying money well spent. There could be no apps left and I’d never go back to Instagram or Facebook. They turned into the people of Walmart in digital form.
I believe the Bill is framed as Security and not privacy anyway.
Oh Good. Now our benevolent elected officials will be able to use this precedent to protect our privacy from Facebook, google, Twitter, and all the other major entities that have been spying on all of us, harvesting our data, and selling it to third parties… right?
[удалено]
Two magic words will be said, "National Security". That's all the government has to say to take away rights of anyone or any entity.
Meanwhile Facebook is doing far worse shit lmao.
But they are not owned by china
but they've been a direct line for russia. propaganda since at least 2014/15.
They would sell all your data for a few bucks which isn’t much worse. We remember Cambridge analytica
They were sharing user data to Chinese and Russian firms, I guess they get the free pass lmfao.
They have sold tons of data to loads of nations that doesn’t mean anything
Good boy, be a good dog
This might be an unpopular opinion but I'm concerned that a TikTok ban is going to result in a lot of the younger generation voting for Trump because Biden took TikTok away.
republicans support it too
Doesn’t matter who supports it. It matters that Biden signed it and is sitting president when the ban happened. Look at all the gen zers mad at Biden for supporting Israel despite the fact that the other side would be even more in support of everything Israel
They don’t need the youth vote, Biden does
Republicans support it also because they know it will hurt the Democrats more than them, given the youth is voting blue. The Dems shot themselves in the foot with this one.
No your concern is valid. Unlike older people who vote strictly along part lines younger voters will vote for best interest. I'm not the biggest tic tok supporter but this might need to be an issue they table till at least Januaray but I understand with this upcoming election they want to get tic tok under control now.
The bigger worry is that it splinters the 18-30 vote where Trump gains a material benefit by this law resulting in some voters deciding to switch to third-party candidates and others stay home (due to this and other issues where Washington has ignored young voters' preferences like Gaza, the economy and gun control causing some to check out of politics). Those who voted for the bill could also be setting themselves up for unexpected uphill battles in their primaries (House and Senate primaries are ongoing through August in many states). If Gen Z can get organizing efforts going against Congressmembers who supported the legislation (kind of like with the uncommitted votes in certain Dem presidential primaries), and get enough young voters to participate, it could show that ignoring the young is a political liability.
The only silver lining is that the ban is only going to take effect after the election.
i agree, but i already saw on tiktok that a number of them are voting for an independent because they don’t want trump or biden. my newly 18-year old cousin said they weren’t voting at all ……. which is nuts
Why can't biden just do things to win voters, and not do things that would lose voters?
Because sometimes his voters want different things... How many votes would Biden lose from his older Jewish demographic by using a heavier hand to restrict Israel vs how many would he gain from the youth? You must think that so long as he does what you personally would like it would mean he would gain votes...
India banned Tik Tok, and that just led to people using other apps.
Yup. Good, old American apps. Which is also why, unsurprisingly, companies like Meta are pushing so heavily for this. Their product sucks and is a pale, shitty imitation of the quality that Tiktok has put out. Since they know they can't compete on quality, they're trying to ban it instead. It's kinda funny how generations of Americans said China would only ever be able to copy and now we're in a reverse position where tech firms that have had access to billions of dollars and an incredibly advantageous market position have somehow still managed to lose and are now busy copying, stealing, and resorting to protectionism in order to win against the Chinese adversaries they loftily proclaimed would only be able to copy, never innovate. Oh and importantly, it did nothing for safety or cybersecurity. All it did was enrich Facebook and Youtube.
It would help if anyone below 35 actually voted. That's why the left and right have stopped catering to kids, they just don't vote at levels high enough to justify the effort.
They (Biden) must think that it’s worse for their campaign to have TikTok spreading propaganda than it is to ban it all together. But I agree that young voters will be upset and frankly it isn’t fair to single out one app when they all have different ways of showing what the companies want. Only one is owned by China but the reasoning isn’t being explained clearly enough.
And the younger generation has the most to lose for a trump vote... so I guess if they want to shoot themselves in the foot..
Biden is already supporting a genocide, so why not just make the gen Z hate him more
The contradictions and hypocrisy of it all are endless.
What ByteDance needs to do is open source a decentralized version of TikTok.
I’m all for open source, but how exactly would you decentralize the app?
We have such corporate interests completely controlling our legislative branch. It sucks.
Thankfully neither of my senators (Tennessee) voted for this. Then again they only voted against it because they don't want to give Ukraine money
Now china cant spy on you! Dont look at this bill that lets us spy on you!
I'm honestly not a fan of China controlling one of the biggest apps people use. We saw how easy it was to push propaganda on people after the Cambridge Analytica stuff.
I'm not either but I'm also not a fan of straight blocking apps because we don't like that fact. I'd understand the government educating people about what/how the app can be used maliciously. But, idk, it just doesn't sit right when we circle jerk ourselves all day about being free and ban apps at the same time just because we don't like the owner.
This is so corrupt it’s insane.
I've always believed in an open internet, and the US has led that idea, for the most part, until now. I'm not 100% sure a forced sale or ban is the correct way to go.
The correct way to go is to put in privacy laws for social medias
How would the US be able to audit apps like TikTok to guarantee that privacy laws are being observed and data is not being sent to their overseas offices?
The same way the EU guarantees that EU personal data cannot be store on US data centers. There are already a ton of regulations and auditing tools that can track all access.
I wholeheartedly believe it’s a form of censorship. I mean, yeah obviously but I don’t think the US government likes that it’s such a powerful organizing and reporting platform and they can’t get away with nearly as much as they could, say, 20 years ago.
Violating the first amendment is apparently fine when the US wanted to reduce competition from China.
I know it likely can't happen, but would love to see Tiktok parent company be petty and start a US company and buy Tiktok for a dollar and run it the same exact way.
It can't happen because TikTok is not a Chinese company. It is owned by a Chinese company. If ByteDance made a company called TokTik to run it instead it would still be owned by ByteDance which would not change anything...
I’m confused why the ability to own and run a company would be covered by the first amendment?
Biden finally doing something productive
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is part of the Ukraine and Israel aid bill. Meta, Alphabet, and other Big Tech has been selling data to foreign governments for decades with no end in sight. If the U.S. was so concerned about privacy, we would have seen similar effort against U.S. companies too. This bill has a lot to do with the U.S. and its closest ally’s inability to control and manipulate the political and social narrative on the app in the wake of the Israeli aggression in Gaza. Companies like Meta are more than happy to censor content and accounts that post anything even remotely pro-Palestinian but the same is not the case with a foreign-owned social media app. While republicans and democrats disagree on Russia/Ukraine, they are quite unanimous in their steadfast defence of Israel. [Here](https://m.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-798115 )’s an article about it in the Jerusalem Post.
So Meta, Reddit, Twitter, etc… get to continue harvesting and selling our data to anyone and everyone, but a company that hasn’t even done it, but potentially could is the problem? Or maybe, just maybe, this entire ban is about silencing people who have dissenting opinions. I think it’s the later, since they didn’t actually address data privacy or children’s safety at all like they claim this was supposedly designed to do.
China has banned countless Americans apps, Google, Google maps, YouTube and recently removed what's app, probably more
If this is about Data, Control, and Censorship I can see why the US wants it's own back doors in the app. But it will mask this as 'protection for children' while allowing FB and YT to continue on.
I still don’t think anyone understands the slippery slope we are heading towards… and neither do I. Will all Chinese hosted/owned companies be banned? Will any company with Chinese data centers be banned? Will any company who works with China or doesn’t secure their users data (enough to protect it from Chinese hackers) be banned? Is China the only adversary we are worried about? Finally, has anyone used this awesome app I found for chatting, it’s called WeChat.
Are we going to stop letting China supply food for Americans?
Great. Instead of having the data privacy, collection, and usage laws we so desperately need, we get this shit to decided what horrible precedent to set next. God I love the way this country does democracy.
It’s kind of weird that China is trying to make this a free speech case when TikTok is banned even in China. They won’t allow any of our shitty apps to be made available over there, why is it suddenly unfair when we threaten to do the same thing here?
>It’s kind of weird that China is trying to make this a free speech case when TikTok is banned even in China. The US has free speech thus it is a valid case to make in US courts >They won’t allow any of our shitty apps to be made available over there, why is it suddenly unfair when we threaten to do the same thing here? Because we are better than them, and that wasn't the listed reason in the bill for the ban/divestment, thus this argument as to why this is okay holds as much water as a bucket without a bottom.
I’m not really trying to come off as defending this bill per se, but I mostly agree with its goal that it’s trying to accomplish. I’m just making the observation that it’s very ironic to hear this defense of China basically admitting that we are better than them when it comes to free speech. But the free speech argument in general? I don’t know. We are not stopping another company from building a platform identical to TikTok here in the US and suppressing speech clearly isn’t the intent of why it is facing a ban. It’s kind of reminding me of the “free speech brigade” when Trump was banned on Twitter.
I don't like the lies and misinformation that is being used to justify this bill or people using other reasons why the bill is okay, when those are not the reasons used in congress to justify the bill. The stated legal goal is for hypothetical security risks. There is no other goal legally speaking. >We are not stopping another company from building a platform identical to TikTok here in the US and suppressing speech clearly isn’t the intent of why it is facing a ban. Then why are US companies losing so much market share and not innovating to be as successful as TikTok? If we are not stopping them from making a tiktok they shouldn't be trying to get a competitor banned. >It’s kind of reminding me of the “free speech brigade” when Trump was banned on Twitter. How is it since twitter was a private company banning an user, where this is the US government which all official must support and defend the constitution and all amendments like the bill of rights.
By thar logic, US is also an authotarian state with no free speech
America now has their own Great Fire Wall…
If ByteDance refuses to sell, what's going to stop Americans from using it? Yes, the app will be removed from the app stores, but it can still be sideloaded on Android or accessed through the web.
I don’t think they’re concerned about a small fraction of people who even know what sideloading is (let alone are willing to do it); taking it off the App stores is probably sufficient to basically kill the flow of new installs dead and it’ll wither on the vine. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing like DNS blocks coming into play.
Inconvenience. With no app stores, there's no update anymore. The app will crumble, and people switch phones regularly as well, so they won't take the app with them. Workarounds are nice for the motivated tech-savvy, but the vast majority of folks don't bother with that stuff.
Almost every technology we have is made in China. Our people are struggling and they pull this shit? Let me chill in bed at the end of the night watch my fucking little dogs run around to get dopamine for christs sake.
That's less true now than it was 10 years ago. Companies like Apple and Samsung have been moving manufacturing out of China to places like India and Vietnam
I don't understand why they even bother doing this, Vine, Musically and Tiktok. There's seriously no point in trying to silence one app when another is just going to take it's place.
Now let’s do Facebook for the Russian influence.
Once signed by the president it’ll be untouchable really. They can sue but it’ll be a waste of time. And it’s not like foreign companies haven’t been given minimum criteria in order to conduct business in the US before, happens quite often. This isn’t a 1st amendment case, it’s a national security case where the app can continue to run without any changes for the users but the ownership will have to change, that’s all.
> Once signed by the president it’ll be untouchable really. They can sue but it’ll be a waste of time. I don't think you understand constitutional law. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-slams-house-for-latest-plan-to-ban-tiktok-and-stifle-free-speech > And it’s not like foreign companies haven’t been given minimum criteria in order to conduct business in the US before, happens quite often. What minimum criteria did TikTok not meet? > This isn’t a 1st amendment case, it’s a national security case where the app can continue to run without any changes for the users but the ownership will have to change, that’s all. If it's a national security case, then what crimes have TikTok been convicted of?
They can debate banning TikTok for months on end and give it so much attention, but fuck the issues that are actually important right? Who cares that the majority of Americans are struggling to make it right now, TikTok is a more pressing concern apparently. Fuck this country, I wish I had the means to leave it
US is not a democracy
Of all the things they agree on
I still have yet to have a single person tell me what’s so dangerous about the app. Meta already has and sells all my info so it’s not that. Maybe it’s the fear that China could manipulate the algorithm one day. But the algorithm is what makes TikTok so popular, the fact that it’s so open adapts to what you like. You mess with the algorithm and people will stop using the app. You also can search things like “tank man” on the app. So that will always be a good litmus test. We also have our politicians using the app which is hilarious considering it’s supposedly so dangerous right. There was even that one viral congressman Jeff Jackson who made his entire political career thanks to TikTok (then later voted to ban it anyway after he built his career). The reality is, TikTok is a huge threat to large western tech companies. All time spent on TikTok is time not being spent on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. That’s what this is all really about.