Rand Paul blocks the fast-tracking of TikTok ban
wionews.com
wionews.com
Granted, the headline is a bit misleading: Paul blocked the fast-tracking of the bill. Presumably it could still make it to the floor for a full vote.
Doesn't mean that's the cause obviously, but still worth keeping in mind.
> It’s also spent over $13 million lobbying the federal government since 2019, per OpenSecrets, including a record $5.4 million last year. ByteDance’s spending on lobbying was reportedly the fourth-largest among internet companies, behind only Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet.
> Records show that the same politicians who’ve publicly attacked the app and voted to restrict its use have also accepted donations from top executives with TikTok and its parent company ByteDance.
> Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that in the last election cycle, ByteDance and TikTok employees handed out $130,000 in campaign donations to a range of politicians. A third of these donations came from one person: David J. Urban, who was the executive vice president of ByteDance at the time. (Urban has since left the company.) His profile on his current employer’s website says that he helped ByteDance “navigate public policy and communications challenges.”
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/tiktok-bytedance-donations-ke...
Buying regulators to stifle your new competitor because you can't hack it is a classic game.
1. Large social networks don’t come and go in a few years: facebook’s still a major force in most people’s live, instagram’s still huge, the dead social networks are all from the early days (myspace, friendster, livejournal, msn/aim) and as far as i recall none of them had only a six year run.
2. The thing that makes tiktok /facebook/instagram/etc interesting is interacting with other humans. No ai content is going to approach that for at least another ten years, and potentially never.
Huawei/ZTE has been banned from sale and thus import and I effectively view this as equivalent and likely permissible under law in any case - so it’s probably the case they can just ban it from App stores though not actually block it on the internet - which I would frankly find acceptable (admittedly, it would likely be a death knell)
I don’t want to live in a populist/nationalist world, but a little bit of reciprocity, through protectionism, in small doses, isn’t a terrible thing.
TikTok's popularity, while in part fueled by the algorithm, is largely a matter of network effect. Sure, a small portion of the users may "stick it to the man" and go through the trouble of working around the ban, but it won't be anything close to a majority of the 150+ million users they currently have in the US.
This is all also somewhat beside the point -- the bill in question here isn't bad because it bans TikTok; it's bad because it hands almost unfettered Internet censorship power to the executive branch and provides stiff penalties for workarounds such as VPN use to circumvent blocks. Which is why it's been called by some the USA PATRIOT Act 2.0.
It is an interesting question if there's a good way to produce a legal vehicle to apply import/export restrictions to software, but this definitely isn't it.
We're rapidly approaching a time where a lot of US citizens who think they can play both sides have to decide if they are an American first or not.
If you're still in the later camp, when times get tough you're more likely to be first to the black market. First to burn your ration card. I see all kinds of firsts in the future for such folks, none of them America.
Good riddance.
Ban algorithmic ordering of content. Make a strong privacy policy that makes it impossible to track and/or collect data on you without opting-in. Make the opt-in text and prompt default to no, with the language of the opt-in and the buttons standard. Require ads to be prominently labeled, and require users to be offboarded if they break advertising laws.
The real problem is that the aim of these bills isn't to protect us. It's to harm China, and to sneak in changes that gives the government more ability to access our private data, or to block encrypted communications.
Or not that kind of "liberty" then. (Paul favors a federal ban on abortion - throwing doctors and mothers in jail for miscarriages and other medical emergencies that can't be adequately explained to the local abortion police). That's "libertarian" apparently
Although the libertarian party doesn't speak for all - here is a decent summary: https://www.lp.org/libertarians-on-abortion/
That litmus test will misclassify 18% of Democrat/lean Dem and 38% of Republican/lean Rep. As a litmus test for determining party affiliation, it's shit.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...
Well sure, if you define "libertarian" as "hypocritical bro who wants the government to not touch his own personal things but feel free to go nuts on women, minorities, bailing out huge banks I make use of with taxpayer money", the abortion issue is not much of a litmus test.
Otherwise calling abortion a "contentious" issue for dictionary-definition libertarianism, that's something libertarians would think to make themselves feel better about supporting the most intrusive government overreach imaginable.
Do you know any of this?
I think if you are completely ignorant of modern medicine, you should probably sit down before commenting on what "abortion" is and what the actual effect of anti-abortion laws is.
sources:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/20/rural-hospital-texas...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/16/health/abortion-texas-sepsis/...
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/07/1161486096/abortion-texas-law...
etc etc
We should make buying politicians illegal, so that we can see their actual character.
I simply can't trust the word of a politician that's arguing in favor of the company that bribed them.
But like you said whether it's on principle or not the reason for his objection is beside the point.
Then again, and going back to the /pol/ example, more horrible conduct is being condoned on that front than on TikTok, or at least more blatant radical behavior, and yet here we are talking about a bill to ban a Chinese-made reels et al.
A few years ago this would have sounded like a conspiracy theory. Now it's the only logical conclusion.
“Do you track pupil dilation?!”
It is not like this is a one sided problem.
/s
I don't know if TikTok should be banned or not; I haven't looked in to the matter in great detail. But limiting one particular method to disperse speech is not limiting free speech as a concept; this entire argument is silly and just poisons the entire discussion.
You mean other than the vandalism aspect? I think that might even be vandalism if you used scotch tape.
At some point a method to disperse speech becomes so disruptive to the general public interest it makes sense to step in. I am talking about the method of dispersal only here, NOT the content. Is TikTok too disruptive? I don't know, but I do know that is what the discussion should be about, and Rand Paul's arguments are missing the point.
Not looked at kindly and carrying the force of criminal prosecution are worlds apart
So TikTok is covered by freedom of speech. Okay. But what about content coming from Chinese servers, or say, foreign companies that are obligated to give your personal information to a foreign government?
It's never been so much the speech itself but how it's presented to others.
Of course; absolute freedom rarely exist, as exercising absolute freedom tends to infringe on the freedom of others. The classic case is that my freedom to play music at 4am as loud as I please infringes on my neighbour's freedom to sleep at night. "Freedom" is not a one-dimensional axis that can go either up or down but a complex matrix with all sorts of interactions.
Scotch tape didn't exist in 1517.
Could you quote from the article where this argument is made?
I see these arguments:
1. Banning TikTok is similar to what China does. What China does is bad.
2. It will harm Republicans to ban a popular social media app
3. The act gives the executive too much discretion to ban modes of communication <- Main argument
It is illegal to nail thesis to church doors, but also to trees, houses, hospitals, military installations, porches, fences, barns and anything else without the owners permission.
It is illegal no matter what the thesis says, who wrote it or what church you are nailing it to.
This will ban sharing with the owners permission, but only of a specific church because it is owned by people we don't like.
I don't see how anyone can look at this and not see a clear issue with freedom of speech here.
This isn't a defense of Tik Tok or any of these platforms. They are all collecting massive amounts of user data and all of them are privacy nightmares. But this Tik Tok ban stuff is partially anti-China theater and mostly "why won't you allow us access and control like the other guys are doing?" garbage. This would all go away overnight if Tik Tok put ex US FBI or CIA staff on their board of directors.
Zoom spent $240,000 in 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
Compare that to TikTok's $5.4 million in the same year
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
By your logic, TikTok should be supersafe.