Lawmakers shift gears on TikTok ban
politico.com
politico.com
Even calling it the "TikTok ban" is rather misleading.
Is that really on the table? If yes, then it's bat-s*it insane, it's maybe rude to call it that but there's no better word to describe it.
To put it in perspective, throughout the '80s people were not getting sent to 20 years in prison for listening to Radio Free Europe here in Eastern Europe. There were still some political prisoners left, put in prison under different pretexts, but they had not gotten in there only for listening to Radio Free Europe.
Not really. That might be the maximum sentence but the chance that a kid who's downloaded tiktok using a vpn of getting anywhere near that is near zero. See: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
2. I don't know what specific case you're referring to by "MPAA and RIAA [...] go after little old grandmas for their love savings", but the relevant laws likely predated mp3s and filesharing programs, so it's not clear how "we thought might otherwise go unpunished" would apply here. If anything it's the reverse. The laws existed, and people thought they wouldn't apply to them for whatever reason and ignored them.
1. When the comparison I'm trying to draw is "huge powerful entity using its power", what exactly is the difference?
2. I don't think there needs to be a specific case - it was in the news often enough for it to be a common thing. Here is an EFF article reviewing what happened years later:
https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later
"Five years later, the recording industry has filed, settled, or threatened legal actions against at least 30,000 individuals. These individuals have included children, grandparents, unemployed single mothers, college professors"
Floor tiles and apples can't be compared? They are both are shiny. You can walk on both of them. You can find them both in a kitchen. You can eat one, you can't eat the other. This is besides the point.
I've asked before upthread: Tell me the difference between the RIAA/MPAA and the US DOJ. Everyone keeps telling me they are different but then no one actually explains how.
I am trying to invoke this comparison: "powerful entity" "group of people with power" "The Powers That Be"
I don't care one is private or one is public. My entire point of making the comparison is "big guy fucks the little guy" - if you can't tell me how the RIAA/MPAA&DOJ are different in this regard - then you are completely off topic and don't understand my point.
Can you tell me, how comparing the MPAA/RIAA to the USDoJ does NOT have any relevance?
Who said I was bragging? It was a statement.
I have first hand experience that that is not true in all cases. Less than 200 songs & movies. The RIAA was asking for $7-$10 per song and the MPAA about $17 per movie.
The lawmakers behind the bill assure us it will only be used against "corporations and executives who conspire to evade a mitigation order or ban — not everyday Americans". However, there's nothing in the bill that excludes "everyday Americans" from the penalties.
It's slightly more complicated than that. As it stands right now it's unclear whether personal use of tiktok would violate the proposed law, because it only bans US companies from dealing with chinese companies. That said the bill also allow the commence department to enact "mitigation measures", which if you tried to bypass them could get you in trouble.
>This bill is not a “ban” on personal use, or even on a technology directly. The bill may result in a ban on TikTok because it grants the Commerce Department such broad authority. That ban may take the form of removing it from app stores or a forced sale, or other mitigation measures imposed against the owners of the technologies.
>[...]
>The bill authorizes the Department of Commerce to impose “mitigation measures” without any restrictions on what those measures might be. Couple that with a vague enforcement provision that grants the power to broadly punish any person who “evades” these undefined “mitigation measures,” and the result is a law that can be read as criminalizing common practices like using a VPN to get a prohibited app, side-loaded installations, or using an app that was lawfully downloaded somewhere else.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/broad-vague-restrict-a...
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
I don't know what the base offense level of such a crime would be, but from looking around some of the other things that's similar, I suspect you would be looking at about a 10 or so--or a year or so in prison.
You'd have to ban TikTok based on something it does, and any such law would impact a lot of other companies too.
Or I guess you could ban all Chinese software using trade laws, but that has even bigger ramifications.
An actual kinetic conflict would result in a complete destruction of the world economy and WWIII. You can't take these people seriously without carefully examining their motivations (certainly most notably, to build up the capacity of our own military).
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
I don’t believe TikTok and Pegasus belong in the same category.
Regarding Twitter, only Elon can answer how much of American’s Twitter data is flowing through KSA, though I believe it’s zero.
Edit: I’m fully behind any moves to ban Pegasus.
This is congress trying to ban a named product by bypassing the courts, in order not to have to bother with the whole "burden of proof" thing, rather than the justice department bringing a case to the courts to get existing laws enforced.
And yes, technically it's "congress makes the laws, the courts enforce those laws", but congress is bound by the constitution, and if congress singles out a specific individual or company, that's (amazingly, because it almost never is) an actual first amendment violation.
Whereas taking a company to court in order to get it banned for "spying on behalf of a foreign nation" is not.
Not that I agree with the premise above, but:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
The part I disagree with is the idea that "they're using the app to spy on us" is a benchmark that some in the government care about, or a reasonable benchmark at that.
On this topic there are often people asking for evidence that TikTok has done anything wrong, but that's really besides the whole point. Governance can be an issue whether or not someone has abused a power. Past performance is not the be-all and end-all of security; means and motivations are also something to consider.
Because that would be literally the opposite of reality O_o
The question is around whether the DoJ can make things stick, and the DoJ doesn't waste its time, and doesn't burn its budget, on cases they know they can't make stick.
Arguments aren't a source of law, and what's permissible in legislation is defined by the constitution.
Oh, sweet, summer child.
Reading the full text of the constitution won't do much but put you a toe past the starting line in understanding what is and is not "constitutional" in the US.
If you decide that "no Chinese social network is allowed", you can create a law for that. But the TikTok ban is not like this.
Impact to the country's critical infrastructure and digital economy,
"Sabotage or subversion" of ICTS in the United States
Interference and manipulation of federal elections
Undermining the democratic process to "steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States".
A blanket ban on "Chinese tech" is immeasurably broad, and would harm legitimate business interests. Should Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle stop doing business in the country if they're selling products and services to Chinese tech firms?
Correspondingly, Tencent has holdings in many American companies, Reddit and Twitter being two. Should Reddit be forced to buy out their holdings?
I mean, yeah maybe. If there's a real national security risk it would make sense. Not that I think either of those companies are in any way trustworthy, but let's not compound the dangers to the public with CCP interference.
Precisely. But as it stands, they even haven't made a case against Tiktok, let alone private investments by Chinese companies.
There's nothing stopping the DOJ from laying charges against Tiktok US (the corporation) if there's evidence of contravening US law. But there is plenty of political hay to be made by suspecting that there might be. What laws, you ask? That too hasn't been clear, which helps explain why these bills fail again and again.
I think it's fine to incarcerate suspected terrorists first and ask questions later. Since the courts most definitely won't allow that on American soil, we'll incarcerate them in Guantanamo. If we find out later they aren't terrorists we'll just release them. /s
China doesn't allow such social media networks from the US.
I got no problem banning theirs.
When did this happen?
You might see wonderful flowers, rainbows, and ads for friendship bracelets while another person might see death, destruction, conspiracy theories, and ads for food prepping. Selective targeting is a power that politician have wanted for many decades. That was last available through Facebook Ads and became controversial years later with Cambridge Analytica.
On one hand, TikTok might be powerful enough to change the outcome of elections in more countries than just the US. On the other hand, access to information is generally a good thing and you want people to be knowledgeable and to make more informed decisions.
But yes on social media.
I don’t see any issues with that.
The government can go suck eggs.
> proposes that the Secretary of Commerce be given the power to review business transactions involving certain information and communications technologies products or services when they are connected to a "foreign adversary" of the United States, and pose an "undue and unacceptable risk" to the national security of the United States or its citizens.
A court could still find it unconstitutional depending on how its targeted and the statements of its sponsors, but textually it is a ban based on broad criteria.
I guess you could institute privacy laws and regulations to protect consumers from all software.
I think for some reason since this is more public facing people seem to think it is somehow different than bans on Russian firearms or engaging with literally any commerce with Iran.
A bill that says it is criminal to have ever had TikTok on your phone or it is criminal to have every distributed TikTok in the US would likely be a bill of attainder.
A bill that says that after some date that future it becomes illegal to have TikTok or distribute it would not be a bill of attainder.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedan...
It seems futile to ban the distribution of software, and while you can get ISPs to block access to an IP/range, there are easy ways around this. See also: torrents of unlicensed-everything and the use of mirrors, proxies, etc. to access the sites that index them.
Not saying it wouldn't put a dent in use, but if all I had to do was get a copy of the installer I'd hardly consider that "banned". All sorts of software is technically illegal to distribute or acquire but it doesn't exactly seem to stop people who want it. In this case there wouldn't even be DRM to crack (like on a game or Photoshop or whatever).
Two words: App. Store.
They did come up with it first, it was called Vine. I would even go as far as calling TikTok a Vine clone.
To me, the defining difference between US company influence in the US is that they also have to live in whatever country they create for us (via their propaganda). Other countries companies don't, and in fact if they aren't our allies would actually be incentivized to do more harm than our own companies (assuming their influence is equal).
It seems to me that allyship is a meaningful pivot for these decisions, moreso than other concerns.
I think they could censor victories and raise losses or fabricated stories, sow doubt at a minimum. Make dead american soldiers trend. Whether we like it or not, most teens get news from tiktok. At a maximum they could brick 150 million phones, use them to ddos, use them to hack/disrupt, etc. steal bank information that is also on your phone. In a war these things would not be off limits. If I were in their shoes that's what I'd do.
Tiktok's like having a spy camera that floats around randomly, taking pictures. 99% of the time those pictures are worthless... in the wrong place, at the wrong time, etc. But once in awhile they have gold.
I still freak out about the Japanese pop star whose stalker managed to see the reflection in her high-res eye photo that had a street sign, found her home address from it. In a war situation, would China ever allow anyone in the US to see a photo of anything inside their country? Would they even allow those to be taken for viewing by other Chinese (for fear it'd somehow leak out to us)?
Would this be possible from an app within either iOS or Android?
To answer- It must be possible, for it to be impossible there would have to be no more vulnerabilities for both platforms and we know that's not the case.
If an app has "coarse location" permissions, I believe it can already do this, or at least could do this a few years ago. Phones give quick, inaccurate location data based on what WiFi SSIDs are around. Google started their database of those SSIDs by wardriving and logging everything. There was a court case about it.
Just because the data isn’t housed within your jurisdiction, doesn’t mean it isn’t accessible to you given enough effort.
There’s entire companies who have products solely used to process data off public social media and create dossiers on people. [0] No row level access required.
[0] https://cellebrite.com/en/cellebrite-smart-search
Not to say it doesn’t obviously make things easier, but the issue is more complex than what some politicians seem to think it is. “Ban TikTok = stop china doing bad things with foreign data”
Maybe the USA and China should sign a data protection agreement and call it Safe Harbor or so.
If you're directing your peace-time policy based on a hypothetical worst that can be done in war-time, you're going to have really insane peace-time policies. If war were to break out tomorrow, we might want to institute a draft, I guess we should start drafting people now?
Nobody would blink twice if TikTok were turned off during a war so I'm not seeing how that hypothetical is relevant to anything.
I'd expect phone lines and internet cables to be turned off during a war too, but I'd be absolutely insane to demand that we cut them now, because of some hypothetical harm that might come if a very particular kind of shooting war between two nuclear powers (that somehow does not end in nuclear war) broke out.
It's good to have the frameworks in place to execute these things when we need them and it's my opinion that we will need them in the next five years.
Instead of doubling down on paranoia of the foreign 33-dimensional chess player[1], if you want the US to strengthen itself, look at dealing with its internal enemies and problems, as opposed to clutching pearls at external ones. All of our injuries are self-inflicted.
[1] I'll note that the Department of State isn't stupid, it plays similar, long-planning games that you ascribe to foreign powers.
All of our injuries are self-inflicted. However, each state will attempt to act in a way to maximize power. In this inevitable confrontation that will set the next rules-based era of power, I want my side to come out on top.
Not necessarily. Relations with most countries are either stable, trending positive, or they are not a threat. China is big enough to be a threat with relations that are trending in the wrong direction. I think it's merely trying to make smart policy prediction.
[1] After all, I can only imagine what will be done in war-time with a telephone connection - and it's not going to be good!
They aren't 'on the table' in any sense of the word. I'm not opening the papers every other week, and seeing yet another take on 'Restart the draft', and 'Cut the phone lines' proposals getting kicked around Congress.
They are kept as options in the event of hostilities, but unlike this ban (Which you use the same justifications to support), nobody's shouting that they need to be done yesterday.
Seems pretty obvious?
Not unlike the companies who are in that game already (but for different reasons).
Nothing that Hollywood and the Western music industry haven't already done to our young minds here Eastern European back in the '80s.
It's not Reagan's StarWars madness that made the communist governments fall, but Star Wars the movie itself, and Michael Jackson, and Madonna, and countless other such Western propaganda (because that's what it was, even though I personally was in love with much of said Western propaganda as a kid).
As evidence that Tiktok has caved to censorship demands, Mondoweis.com was banned today from Tiktok with no reason given.
The RESTRICT Act sounds like, and actually is censorship. That’s why the Biden admin is hard at work repackaging it as the HAPPY Act.
Maybe the "real national security risks" of funny dance or cat clips and pictures of your last meal were slightly exaggerated after all?
1. Anyone who puts an app on your phone can track your behavior, especially your coarse location, but additionally (for TikTok) the trends that you follow. This is actually a huge security risk (affecting basically all devices with any 3rd party apps) that is generally ignored.
2. TikTok allows a foreign government to choose which topics trend which allows them to influence the political and social discourse of other countries.
3. TikTok could be used as a botnet or for network surveillance with a presence on many different LANs.
These problems are mostly not specific to TikTok, but are indeed true for all apps. TikTok just happens to be the most popular app that is developed and managed outside of the USA, making the US more paranoid about it.
It would be nice if anyone explained what those risks are, and why they don't apply to Facebook et al. Banning it on government devices makes sense, but I don't understand why they're trying to ban individuals from using it.
Edit to clarify: I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on the ban. I'd like to understand it better because it feels weird to me to specifically single this one app out, without a clear explanation for why the bad behavior can't be prevented in a more general way.
I don't know if it is intended to hook into some sort of attention hack where they abuse the fact that humans are stimulated by movement and color, so a video with a game background is more appealing/attractive than one without, but it's too much stimulus for me to enjoy it. I try to avoid brain junk food most of the time.
/s
I completely agree with you. It's junk! But expect to see my first paragraph as a common rebuttal.
I don't think the people promoting it for gardening tips are being objective. The app is _designed_ to keep you scrolling.
In execution, I really don't like how much it tries to hotwire our brains to scroll endlessly/seek attention so it can sneak ads in between. I also don't like how so much of it is geared toward instant gratification.
Will we someday feel the same way about social media that we do about tobacco companies? "People willingly addicting themselves to something for the profit of a corporation" sounds dystopian but we've been here for years...
That's exactly it.
Your ADHD brain is satiated by the bright color and movement and you pause long enough for the actual content to get the interesting part.
US privacy laws are a joke. Singling out TikTok without addressing events like Cambridge Analytica with Facebook, is at best suspicious.
They have addressed it, with the single largest FTC fine in history.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
There aren't any laws about that for the same reason that there aren't any laws addressing corporate tax loopholes.
For example, I have seen many videos clearly aimed at young people that casually and weirdly slip in a comment stating that Taiwan is part of China. One example: one of these “a guy asking pretty girls trivia questions” asks two girls a series of questions, to one question she says Taiwan to which says “Taiwan is part of China” in a mocking voice and the other girl laughs at her. Another example: a guy giving statistics about private jet ownership randomly mentioning the number of planes “in China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong”. These all appear to be made by Americans, filmed in LA or Miami, but are clearly either some sort of deliberate attempt to influence public opinion or content creators trying to get their videos promoted by including such comments.
I would hope that kind of thing would be pretty cringeworthily crude and obvious to any teenager raised on a diet of Western advertising. Maybe I'm overoptimistic, though.
1. Tiktok can identify people (in the US, in the government or military) who are in key strategic positions. For example, people with access to interesting information, or who know a lot of people with access to information.
2. Among the group in #1, it can identify people who are vulnerable to recruitment as spies. For example, it can identify any taboo tastes they might have, which are not (necessarily) illegal, but can be used as leverage to recruit a spy. Or identify people with financial problems (another vector for spy recruitment). Or people who are lonely, who would fall for a honey trap, etc.
3. It can spread propaganda I. What happens if the chain of command breaks because someone thinks a war is illegitimate because they've been brainwashed? If Taiwan is and always has been the rightful territory of China, and nearly 100% of Taiwanese and mainland Chinese want them to be united, then why are we fighting a war to keep them apart?
4. It can spread propaganda II. Trade wars are not without downsides. One of them is that it makes imports from China more expensive. Propaganda does not need to be false information. What happens if the public broadly loses support for the trade war because of TikTok propaganda?
5. Remote no-click zero-days for iPhone exist. China has a capable cyber intelligence service. TikTok could be used to spread an exploit to phones of people in key strategic roles.
First of all, any company operating out of China can be assumed to be under more or less direct control of the CCP. When the Party comes knocking, there is no non-compliance to whatever they want. That alone is more than enough reason to be more skeptical of anything China. (Yes, I'm aware of FISA, but that's nowhere near comparable to having Party members on your board)
The second difference/risk comes with looking whom these apps target: kids. Basically, whoever controls the algorithm that ranks what content kids watch, has a very effective way of mind control... kids are sponges, they soak up whatever they see, and especially compared to the old radio/TV era, a lot of what's available on the Internet is pretty dangerous and not vetted by anyone. Be it all kinds of dangerous "challenges", Incel/Gamergate/far-right propaganda, hate against LGBT or whatever - it's all completely intransparent. That's bad enough if done by Western companies for profit reasons, but even worse as a capability in the hands of an enemy nation.
We shouldn't.
They are starting to make AI personas to interact with teenagers.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-chatbot-younger-users-da...
This should almost certainly be banned. I'm not sure on what legal grounds but I am sure this is bad.
Why wouldn't it be? TikTok is now a US company with the data of US citizens stored in Austin TX.
https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about
https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-myths-vs-facts
This is actually insane, the level of paranoia surrounding ByteDance has forced TikTok to jump through a billion hoops that no other foreign company has to and weirder still they did. Like my HIPAA is less protected than this.
> Myth: Under its 2017 National Intelligence law, the Chinese government can compel ByteDance to share American TikTok user data.
> Fact: TikTok Inc., which offers the TikTok app in the United States, is incorporated in California and Delaware, and is subject to U.S. laws and regulations governing privacy and data security. Under Project Texas, all protected U.S. data will be stored exclusively in the U.S. and under the control of the U.S.-led security team. This eliminates the concern that some have shared that TikTok US user data could be subject to Chinese law.
Not sure if I would agree. A friend works there and he's the only English speaking and Caucasian.
TitTok is not a small company.
The unspoken truth is that TikTok is doing the same shady things as Facebook, but the government doesn't want to ban or regulate Facebook, so a special law has to be crafted to target TikTok.
So far as I can tell, the people most vulnerable to Internet propaganda, manipulation, and general bullshit, aren't kids. They're old people. And maybe younger people who've been raised in bubbles that were a bit overprotective.
TikTok users are mostly teenagers, not little children. By the time you hit your teens, whatever anti-manipulation systems humans have seem to have largely kicked in. That's what you'd expect, really, since that's always been about when you had to start playing the manipulation and anti-manipulation game in real life.
Another part of youthful plasticity seems to be an ability to adapt your defenses to the particular threats you're seeing. When I was a kid, seeing something in 4 or 5 apparently "independent" written sources was pretty good evidence that it was true, or at least widely believed. My own kid seems to have a pretty good intuitive knowledge that she can't just trust those sources' independence, or their credentials, or their judgement.
Sure teenagers can parse bias in the media they are consuming, but is it that effective when the media company can tailor content based on the user's preferences + the preferred political manipulation?
Not saying you should ban it, just a thought.
Have you read/seen any of the follow up[1] on the CA scandal? Basically CA couldn't do most of the things they promised they could do with the data they collected. Their supposed ability to manipulate the public was effectively a "fake it till you make it" startup pitch. I find it funny that it keeps getting brought up as a worst case scenario when it seems like it was a nothingburger.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-213-rewriting-...
Statements like that really make me question people's knowledge of basic history and international politics. Yes, a nation's major commercial actors often work in conjecture with their government. Is this news to anyone? This is not unique to China in the least.
> The second difference/risk comes with looking whom these apps target: kids.
And this argument is so tired that it even has its own Wikipedia page explaining that it is a logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
There's a difference between cooperating with the government - my country, Germany, is infamous for the close webs between government and its car companies - but there is no chain of command (other than a partial stake that Lower Saxony holds in VW) between the industry and politics. If anything, it's the other way around, companies pay a shitload in "party donations" to have the government represent its interest in the EU and abroad.
> And this argument is so tired that it even has its own Wikipedia page explaining that it is a logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
A lot of TOTC is bullshit and usually pulled for the ulterior motive of (effectively) banning stuff for adults by imposing obscene obstacles (such as the planned EU chat control, or British anti-porn legislation). But here, it's aimed squarely at adolescents who use Tiktok as their most popular news source [1] - no matter what, that IS dangerous.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/20/tiktok-is...
See the disappearance of Naomi Wu or Peng Shuai.
Why would you want people learning that censorship or misinformation from an authoritarian foreign power is good? What fraction of total media time do you think 12-18yo spend on TikTok? Should the goal be to create a repressive dictatorship here?
In any case, comparing the level of control of "major commercial actors often work in conjecture with their government" sounds awfully stretched.
This was used during my childhood by the Reagan (and subsequent) administration as justification for cracking down on the drug war and leading us closer to a police state, skirting constitutional rights, etc. Of course the children they were supposedly protecting got arrested for smoking pot and underage drinking and whatnot, damaging their lives and future outlook, sometimes significantly.
That doesn't mean that threats to the well-being of children don't actually exist. Your blanket rejection is no better than the insincere use of TOTC.
Let's grant that TikTok is under direct CCP control, and specifically targets kids. Targets them for what? Mind control?
Attempts to change/form their views to be favourable towards dictatorships and antagonistic to democracies.
/s
I still don't understand how TikTok is doing anything worse than what any other popular American-based social platform is already doing today. If we're going to legislate TikTok, we should also target Facebook, Fortnite, Twitter, etc. equally.
1: https://www.techspot.com/news/100426-shell-using-fortnite-so...
But at least we can, in contrast to TikTok whose operations run outside of our reach.
If there was an easy way to reign in big oil then we would have found it by now. Whereas we (democracies) would have a fighting chance (literally) of seeing off a malevolant dictatorship.
Shell for example was held responsible in Dutch courts for environmental contamination in Nigeria [1] and ordered to massively cut CO2 emissions [2].
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/25/africa/shell-oil-spills-n...
It doesn't matter if Shell is worse it doesn't matter if a million other fucking things in the USA are worse. They are all accountable to the USA government. TikTok is not that is the issue.
We already didn't prepare for Russia invading Ukraine despite obvious signs, we didn't prepare for wide parts of Africa and the Middle East to break down into civil war or climate change-caused mass emigration, we didn't prepare for Iran/Hamas massacring entire kibbutzim in Israel, we didn't prepare for the scenario of a global pandemic (despite multiple scares/near-misses), we didn't prepare for all of the multiple crises currently ongoing in this world that currently impact our population.
We have to prepare for the possibility that China is going to be at war with us very, very soon and will do anything they can to disrupt our lives - including spreading propaganda. Or otherwise it will go down just as bad as all the crises I listed.
If that's the claim, the reality is they are doing the opposite.
You need to provide proof, not speculation.
You need to provide proof
There won't be proof of war until the war happens, but it makes sense to prepare for war. And there will be war, make no mistake on that - tensions in the entire APAC regions are growing every day.
Or to quote an old Latin proverb: si vis pacem, para bellum - if you want peace, prepare for war.
Rather than china, I'm more concerned about foreigners like you interfering in america and american social media.
What's your particular interest in this? You aren't even american.
What now?
YMMV for different scales of influence. I don’t trust Facebook at all. But they’re not an antagonistic nation state.
Facebook et all aren't subject to CCP control.
I think if they were smart they'd be more low key and focus on censoring posts (which are now stored in the US I believe?), trying to take TikTok down seems like it will continue to blow up in their face.
Imagine the case where the U.S. government would like the (western) world to form certain sentiments on the current regional conflicts that are aligned with its own interests, and then imagine how TikTok's recommendations could be deliberately designed to compromise such alignment...
Changes in the last few weeks have flipped that around and made it terrible if you’re logged out. Friends (with accounts) have started sharing screenshots rather than links, because the links strip all context for a post if you visit them while logged out. Logged out search no longer works. Account pages have seemingly insane post ordering putting posts from months or years ago at the top, and newer posts often no-where. Whole site’s now entirely useless without an account.
The first amendment is the first one for a reason. Free expression is key to keeping a democracy, IMO.
Put it all together and what you have isn't a vibrant democracy with a bunch of dissenting voices, but thought bubbles shaped almost entirely by the ultra-rich and their political allies, manipulating the billions away from human rights and democratic principles -- arguably the intent of what the 1A was actually trying to protect. Instead of a citizen-first democracy, it's been warped into a "capital compels thought" dystopia. There's nothing free about this expression; it is both expensive as in dollars and enslaved as in ideology.
The founding fathers were documented as being MUCH more forward-thinking than most people assume. The thought bubbles you mention and mass-manipulation existed hundreds of years ago. "Capital compels thought" isn't new and the only saving grace is the anyone can voice anything they desire and we don't need any license to participate in the marketplace of ideas.
I agree. I think the modern-day challenge is not that one cannot speak freely, but that their voice cannot compete with institution-sponsored propaganda machines --- after all, humans have limited attention. The situation is arguably worse because it suppresses free speech without being appear to suppress it.
I'd say that qualification requires some upgrade. What's worse than an obvious propaganda machine?
A machine.
As for the 1A --- I didn't mean to fault it; it is not its fault.
When has the common person alone ever had the voice to compete with large institutional voices? I think never, except today it’s actually easier for a lone person to get a huge platform without owning a newspaper.
Suppose we pass laws allowing the executive branch to limit speech that’s against national security. Who is to say a future government won’t use it against us to limit our freedoms rather than a foreign agent’s? We already can see several laws passed to limit terrorism have instead allowed the government to spy on regular citizens and other such abuses. Now, in the name of “national security” we want to move away from free speech and start censoring things according to the current administration’s wishes? No thank you!
Very good point!
> Suppose we pass laws allowing the executive branch to limit speech that’s against national security.
But I don't think this necessarily follows. In the US, government is always the default bogeyman for "authoritarian overreach", but that is so rarely true anymore. I can't remember the last time the executive branch (or any branch) tried to oppress me or take away my sacredly-held freedoms. It's almost always a big corporation or rich man or another: Meta/Twitter/Musk/etc, or a healthcare company, or some TV personality, or some healthcare/gun/religious fanatic lobby.
Why does "we as a society should decide how and when to regulate speech" necessarily lead to "the opposing party's president is going to censor me"? If anything this is just a call for more direct democracy instead of two-party elitism, no? It's not so much a battlecry against government, but of the co-optation of government by the elites -- which are almost always tied to wealth. What really protects the common person is other common people, who only have power in more democratic traditions, not by weakening democratic governments in favor of uber-rich libertarians and corrupt crony capitalism.
I also dislike the weird double speak here, where you argue that to save democracy we can't trust the people. Maybe you are knee deep into the thought bubble you mention too. (Not saying this as an accusation, more so as a sanity check )
My opinion (and that's all this is): When it comes to politics and laws, we should not be dealing with oversimplified binary absolutes, especially when those absolutes were defined by ancient minorities who lived in very different times.
It's not just a binary yes/no, we can or cannot trust the government (or the people, or the media, or anyone). The law should be nuanced enough to deal with exceptional circumstances and evolving societies, not be held back by the summarized opinions of people long dead -- opinions that, however well-intended originally, were later weaponized by cynical oligarchs who put their own interests over that of the country's.
Specifically, when it comes to the Constitution, it was a good idea to enshrine a check and balance against federal government overreach. However, the amendment process is so difficult it may as well not exist, leading to both an overly prescriptive 1A and other issues (like an ambiguous 2A, rights to privacy, etc.)
In my mind, free speech shouldn't be an absolute, but a value we both hold in very high regard most of time, but also know when to temper for the sake of national sanctity -- especially when it comes to things like foreign propaganda or similarly powerful broadcasters.
As an example only, if the 1A were more nuanced and allowed less drastic measures than outright censorship, for example, we could perhaps enact labeling laws for political propaganda on social media, or have truth in political advertising laws, etc. Or, you know, just not have Citizens United because it's terrible policy, despite (or maybe because of) it's 1A implications.
Another example: If the 2A were more nuanced, gun ownership could be both more responsible and less tribal, and something as simple as registration needn't elicit panicked doomsday responses.
It's not that I care about TikTok per se, but what's more terrifying to me than the CCP is that the entire USA is held captive by nine old farts who can interpret and redefine these archaic passages on their whims, with zero checks and balances, and that there are only two shitty parties that appoint them as a tug-of-war game every few years, all without regard to the citizens.
Who should we trust to do this? Nobody and everybody -- as in, my ideal government would be far more democratic and far less elitist, with everything up to and including the Constitution itself subject to public reviews and referendums. Yes, politicians are corrupt and people are dumb, but at the same time, these situations can self-correct over sufficient time if the process allows it. It took France several revolutions, Germany several world wars, the UK multiple lost colonies, etc. to get the societies they have today. We should keep changing too.
My underlying concern is more about Constitutional originalism and other forms of legal fundamentalism overriding the democratic will of the governed. We shouldn't be held hostage by what previous generations of politicians said; we must be able to evolve laws as society itself evolves. This doesn't really happen anymore, especially when one party in particular has a vested interest in using faux traditionalism as a dog whistle.
I don't see this as double-speak. It's only because our Constitution is so old and written so tersely that we are forced to be tribal and take sides for everything in it. In reality, legal situations are never this black and white, and it shouldn't be solely up to an unelected and increasingly corrupt body of judges to interpret our most important laws.
I think this is the chicken-and-egg situation I'm getting at. We can't update the Constitution because it takes a convention to change it (which won't happen). So it just stays there for centuries, warts and all.
Adding patches to laws is how laws get better over time. States do that all the time when they aren't federally preempted. Other countries too.
IMO, and you can disagree, much of the Constitution is both old AND obsolete.
Wish the "good guys" had somebody like that, willing to bend the rules where necessary, but for the public good instead of personal gain.
Other countries have laws and agencies to protect against propaganda; the US doesn't bother. I doubt the propaganda concern is driving political will.
Because TikTok is a "rogue" social media (from the U.S.'s perspective, of course)?
> Other countries have laws and agencies to protect against propaganda; the US doesn't bother.
I am not sure I follow your point here; could you elaborate?
> I am not sure I follow your point here; could you elaborate?
My point is, the US government doesn't otherwise care much about propaganda, so I doubt that's a motivation here.
(GP) > how it can be used to manipulate narratives
On the domestic side of things, Elon Musk is doing this, to an extreme degree, with X/Twitter. I'm someone that follows mostly left-wing/liberal/progressive accounts, yet I keep seeing tweets on my feed (even in the "For you" timeline) from right-wing accounts (that I don't follow).
It's extremely annoying, and it is plain as day obvious that Elon Musk is trying to use Twitter to push the entire U.S. more so in a right-wing direction.
Some of these unwelcome accounts on my feed are anti-Trump conservatives (i.e. The Lincoln Project variety of conservatives)--and even this seems to be carefully engineered by Musk's Twitter/X. X must have recognized that I have left-wing political views, and decided to show me account of milder conservatives, to try to gently sway me in that direction.
Occasionally though, and especially in tweet replies, I often see replies of extreme conservatives (including the openly white nationalist and anti-Semitic kinds. It's truly horrifying how much these voices are being amplified.
Some of it probably has to do with the fact that X's fee-based "Verified" users are being amplified, and the "Verified" user base skews heavily to the right, since likely only they feel comfortable with paying a monthly fee to a right-wing unhinged billionaire[1].
Elon Musk is running one of the largest social-media propaganda campaigns in recent history. In terms of scale, one could even think of the billions sunk into buying Twitter essentially as political spending, considering how Twitter/X has now been transformed into a giant covert right-wing influence machine.
[1] I do pay for Premium Connectivity on my Telsa (which I purchased before Elon Musk went Peter Thiel-style crazy), but Premium Connectivity is pretty much a necessity for me on a Tesla. I personally find Musk's politics (and generally GOP politics) to be beyond-the-pale vile evil and disgusting, to the point that I might be compelled to hold off on my 3-year-old Cybertruck reservation if the Cybertruck actually ever comes into mass production (at a non-inflated price). But, hopefully, someone like Bernie Sanders wins and we tax billionaires out of existence (for example, if Congress enacts a one-time 90% wealth tax on accumulated assets in excess of $500 million)--that would put to rest my discomfort with buying a new Tesla when Musk still has ownership over a significant chunk over Tesla.....
Both technical advances (machine learning) and economic advances by other nations (China) put us closer to an even playing field. I would even go so far as to say we're at a disadvantage here relative to China.
Except, as you point out, on the issue of propaganda.
* A large part of the power structure, one of the major political parties, uses and relies on propaganda extenstively. Yes, both parties do it to some degree, but one relies on revving up its supporters with unending, absolute nonsense.
* Big tech doesn't want to be regulated.
Someone else did post some material though, and I was able to find some information googling myself as well.
We also have whistleblower data that they (allegedly intentionally) intentionally ignored manipulation for the 2016 election. Worth reading Sophie Zhang's narrative:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/29/1030260/facebook...
Sure, none of these is a smoking gun for the explicit claim that the companies themselves are explicitly manipulating users, but they certainly appear to be complicit. Complicit in a conspiracy (in the legal sense) to influence voters.