House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

Americans subject themselves to all kinds of restrictions in terms of what can be imported into the US. There's no contradiction of the freedoms protected by US Constitution in this.

There's certainly no information that Americans need deny themselves by insisting that apps like TikTok are not controlled by hostile foreign governments.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Arguably it's not even one part of the 1st.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If your plan is that people should be strong enough to uninstall or smart enough to recognize subtle propaganda, that seems very likely to fail.

Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms. If someone makes a video of a TikTok video and shares it on Youtube/Whatsapp, that's legal. The actual content is legal, so it's not a free speech/censorship issue.

This is the equivalent of "We've put sanctions on China. You can write whatever you want, as long as you don't do it using Chinese pens and Chinese paper"

It's not at all unusual for countries (including the US) to restrict commerce with a country if they believe the other country isn't engaging in fair commerce.

We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.

We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.

I actually don't remember that. I do remember lots of terroristic and genocidal posts on Parler though.

Having a policy against hosting apps that host illegal content and taking no measures to remove it is a political move? There are plenty of active conservative communities on the internet, Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route. Tumblr faced a ban on iOS for pornographic content and Reddit also has to sanitize their default experience to be on app stores, so it's not just Parler.

It's why BlueSky is interesting because they have moderation which will get them on app stores, but you can turn it off.

Dude, Chinese national living in China here. I have 3 different vpns from 3 different vendors, that is how I manage to get here and talk to you. Care to shed some light on why they restrict my free & open access to the Internet that I dedicated my entire life to build?

> after 2009 minority riots

I strongly support CCP's policies in Xinjiang, it is anti-terrorism for sure. That being said, I wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists".

> It's more accurate to say most major western platforms at the time was simply incapable of of moderating PRC content.

I used to visit a local forum hosted here in China quite often. They carefully moderate the content, all users have to register with their legal names, the forum even had the curfew every night as their moderators need to sleep and they couldn't afford the risk of such human moderator free hours. Guess what, they still got shutdown last year for "regulation reasons".

> There's a reason Bing still operates in PRC, see recent Bloomberg piece on Microsoft keeps Bing running in PRC by basically complying to mass censorship like domestic players.

Because Bill Gates has very good personal relationship with the very top leadership. That is the really scary part.

Usually it's relatively dull stuff, like if country A requires citizens of country B to have a visa to visit, country B will as a matter of course require citizens of country A to have visas to visit too.

Actually in most games that are played repeatedly, the optimal strategy is to cooperate with cooperators and defect against defectors.

"stay on the moral high ground" only works when the other side is roughly playing by the same rules as you are.

With authoritarian nations, with authoritarian leaders? They see any kind of even the slightest allowance as a weakness to exploit, an explicit allowance to move the Overton window. We should have kneecapped China years ago, when the first complaints about industrial espionage came in, and same for Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. We didn't, and now we're a bunch of lame ducks swimming in a pond of manure.

China can change their policy easily with respect to reciprocity

This is the only thing that governs international relations. Look at visa reciprocity, trade agreements, etc. for examples.

For this China having TikTok spread propaganda or addiction in the USA does not then give the USA permission to nuke China as a consequence.

...as long as it benefits our mega-corps.

As soon as they can't compete in these spaces, we immediately turn to protectionism, ag-gag laws, etc.

The one sacred cow we have is profit, everything else is weighed on the axis of advancing it.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ban-apples-iphone-...

https://www.investopedia.com/china-nationalism-response-to-i...

https://fortune.com/2024/03/05/apples-iphone-sales-plummet-c...

I’m fully with you on this. If TikTok is harmful, spread the word and let people make that decision for themselves. If kids are too small to make that decision, that falls on the parents. Don’t take away my rights because others can’t vet companies and use their brains if they should use the apps these companies put out.

No one is asking for a great wall around the US. People are just asking that major influencers are not under the control of hostile governments.

We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.

No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.

Forcing a sale of TikTok so it's not foreign (with a punishment of banning if they don't), especially while making no such law for U.S. controlled competitors, is no more an infringement upon free speech than introducing a tariff or trade restriction on German-manufactured printing presses while leaving domestic models untouched.

I think it’s more accurate to say instead that “the oligarchs who run this place are just mad that it’s telling kids to support Palestine”.

But in general I agree with your point!

There is also legislation giving them to right to regulate foreign ownership of companies. It's scary how much of our stuff is owned by foreign governments. Seems like a national security risk.

Chinese approval of their government is much higher than most Western regimes including the US. I think you are right about how we ought to apply the 1st amendment here, but I don't find that Chinese propaganda is any more insidious or pervasive than American. We just manage it differently: in China the state directly controls the media, while in the US business interests directly control the state and the media.

Speech and individual expression are individual rights and not institution rights. Perhaps you have some argument with "freedom of press" but that's a pretty hefty uphill battle for TikTok to prove that they are press and not just a random social media business.

Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"

The interstate commerce law gives congress the power to make laws that regulate businesses (that operate over state boundaries). That power includes things like outright banning a business for pretty much any reason.

That's a great start, but it's only as valid as an activist judicial branch says it is. If congress passes a law that goes against the reading of that old parchment, someone brings a case that works its way to SCOTUS, then they vote based on the vacation they are provided, then the law is declared valid. If they decide it is not, then it is not. It doesn't matter what some armchair critic of the law thinks. They can tweet and tweet, they can blog and blog, they can vent on forums, but unless they become POTUS in a term where you get to sit 1/3 of the bench, you've got no real shot at changing it. Doesn't matter if you lean left or right, a single POTUS sitting 3 judges is rare enough to not consider it a real possibility. So an activist bench can cause disruption for decades/generations.

Printing presses can't spy on the readers of the paper that goes through them[1]. I think there's a first amendment argument to be made here, but this is way too far out on the absolutist end of the spectrum, not least because this bill doesn't actually regulate TikTok's speech, only who's allowed to own it.

Commercial speech is regulated in thousands of ways already in ways much more effective than this bill. If you really believe in free speech absolutism[2] the fights to be had are elsewhere.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/us/politics/tik-tok-spyin...

[2] And no one does. Everyone starts censoring the second they get their hands on a lever.

I don't disagree currently, but it certainly could be used for that. Due to the invisible hand of the algorithm, it would also be hard to know if a topic was trending naturally, or if TikTok was pushing a viewpoint. Setting aside the issue of whether or not TikTok should be banned, do you agree with the potential propaganda concerns?

Those protections will apply when the platform is owned by American citizens.

This law is asking for no such thing. Even if ByteDance refuses to sell TikTok, Americans would still be able to visit the site.

But this due to a failure of our politicians to respond to the modern era, not because the bill of rights enshrines or applies to foreign companies.

That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen in order to start FOX in the 80s. This then enabled him to build FOX News with the specific intent to become the media arm of the Republican party, by tapping Roger Ailes as the first and guiding CEO. Ailes had already worked on media campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, often credited as a major factor in their victories. So he got to run the day to day of the party's new media arm.

Murdoch himself was an international operator who wanted political power for the benefits rather than the ideology. This is demonstrated by the much more liberal leanings in Australia when that was the party willing to grant him power.

What could the impacts be today, if FOX News was owned by the CCP instead of an Aussie of negotiable political virtue?

I don't think the First Amendment would allow you to use a printing press built out of embargoed components, or arsenic compounds.

The ban isn't on speech. It's on the platform/product, how it's built and distrbuted, and (correctly or not) perceived ways it harms society.

You can have a short-form vertical video app focused on an algorithmic recommendation feed, and you can say whatever you want on that service. But it seems Washington doesn't want it to be sending data and money overseas to the PRC.

> The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead".

The US constitution gives foreign governments the same rights that it gives its own citizens?

…Okay. It actually may or may not give US citizens the "Right to Receive Foreign Speech", without conferring any rights onto the foreign entities themselves, but that's still very much an open question. Here's 50 pages (that I haven't read) on the matter, if you're into it:

https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

Imagine an enlightened and advanced technological culture that refuses to fight. For all their advancements and liberal policies they're still open to being obliterated by another culture that doesn't really care about the whole "war is bad" thing.

I think as society/morals/ethics/law advances, we still need protections in place for "how could somebody exploit this if they don't play by the same rules that we do".

We'll always, unfortunately, still need a person with a large stick and the threat of violence even in a peaceful society.

Yes, and by that logic, TikTok isn't banned, but rather foreign ownership of said app is.

Just "follow the law" and sell the rights.

The 1st amendment right to free speech is about US citizens. This isn't even a US corporation. No 1st amendment there so it looks legal. They probably wouldn't have done anything, if the manipulation and spying had been a bit less blatant. Even Telegram and Kaspersky still operate. This isn't even a WTO trade issue since almost every single tech or manufacturing company (except Tesla?) that wants to sell in China has to be a joint owned venture. It's classic mercantilism and there's no international obligation to buy stuff or allow it's import (see fentanyl). Even TikTok isn't allowed there, VPNs are not just banned, but considered tools of terrorism. Tit for tat is a thing, this has been coming for a decade (only slowed by corporate profits and cheap labor), and the slope isn't very slippery.

Still might not happen, if Kellyanne has anything to say to Trump about it.

If TikTok is banned for geopolitical reasons, reciprocity reasons or whatever you want to call it, that doesn't change anything about free speech in America. It's not the unrestricted speech that was deemed a problem with TikTok, but rather the specific geopolitical risk (or whatever).

You can debate whether or not it is reasonable or important to for the US to impose similar ownership requirements for businesses operating in the US, but couching it in argument of censorship the way China does it is a real false equivalence. Congress doesn't want to censor your speech on Tiktok (Which isn't how the 1st amendment works anyways) they want China to divest itself of US operations.

Sure, but in an act og completely understandable and justafiable reciprocality I guess we should soon see China passing laws to force Microsoft to divest from their American owners or be banned in China. And when that happens I’m sure the same people in this thread arguing that everything is peachy with USAs actions against TikTok will see it as perfectly acceptable and reasonable.

Data seems like a sideshow to me. It’s legal and they could just buy it from data brokers anyway. It’s not like the US has any real laws against that.

Political action is a fair response to the bill but they went about it in an incredibly tone deaf way.

Could trying to sway users subtly have still been a win in this instance?

I'd think a platform doing manipulation subtly is actually more dangerous, and the bigger potential threat from a platform. Because people being influenced would be less aware of it, and it's much harder for other parties to call out.

(Although, when I look at current TV news and some other outlets, there's such blatant manipulation and dumbing-down, from both political "sides", I wonder how more than a small minority of people can tolerate watching that, much less mimicking it. And calling it out just gets tossed into ineffectual echo-chamber sports-fandom-like noise. So maybe subtle isn't as additionally threatening as I'd been assuming.)

Darwinism.

They could've played ball and not pushed politics and we'd have left them alone to make their money but instead they tried to bite the hand that feeds.

TikTok responded by attempting to manipulate democracy.

They did they very thing the government trying to ban them is scared of. Doesn't seem like a smart move to me, I guess we'll see how it plays outs

> (B) a covered company that—

> (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and

> (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

> (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

> (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

---

The above gives the president the ability to shut down many websites out there from operating in the US if they are "controlled by a foreign adversary". Btw, the definition is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872, which says: "Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means— (A)the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea; (B)the People’s Republic of China; (C)the Russian Federation; and (D)the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Which rights are for U.S. Persons only, and which are for all Persons, is not entirely clear to me. But I strongly suspect that freedom of speech and of the press is mainly for U.S. Persons only.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the courts have to say about this.

I think the timing of this is really dangerous for democracy in the US. It may spur a fury and sense of betrayal in a lot of people, meaning they either don't vote, or they vote for the guy who makes a living on telling them the world is out to get them and no one cares about them.

Is your point to say that you specifically don't believe China is an adversary, thus the bill is off the mark? I could read your item as saying either that, or this: in order to promote better relations between adversarial nations, bills restricting the ability of one nation to operate in another are indefensible. In other words, to make sure China is not an adversary, TikTok should not be banned.

We’re not your foreign adversary? (If we are, we shouldn’t have an obligation to defend you.)

This bill permits TikTok’s sale to a European owner. It just bans its ownership by a foreign adversary country.

I think the reason for the outright ban is more due to it being a Chinese product. China isn't known to be very transparent.

They do in fact impose less extreme controls on data from these platforms, that lesser extremity presumably reflecting their lesser perception of the US's use of that data as highly dangerous, as compared to the US's perception of China.

But its pretty clear that the security threat posed by US based services vs certain others is starkly different, especially since the US is generally seen as a beneficial/friendly state.

IMO, somewhat similar situations - popular social media, known for data gathering, based in another country that is viewed as a geopolitical and/or ideological opponent and is often villified.

0: https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/17/technology/russia-linkedin-...

1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/russia-tries-to-...

Profiling of a large population, you put them in cohorts, and slowly shift what you show to these cohorts (based on their preferences, worldviews, etc.) to slowly nudge them into a worldview you'd like. It won't be 100% effective but it can definitely shift perceptions, if each cohort is siloed into their own reality bubbles through what you show them you can stochastically nudge them into a view you want them to hold based on their preferences.

If marketing works even to the people aware of how it works, a concerted effort to use someone's profiling data telling what do they like, dislike, will definitely work on a majority of users.

It's not like it will be blunt, it only has potential if you use this data to slowly shift views by using what's most effective to each cohort, with a large amount of data you can be quite precise in defining these cohorts and using different strategies/tactics for each one depending on what's most effective.

Have you ever worked on anything that did profiling based on accumulated data? I've worked on a few projects back in the early 2010s and even at the time it was scary how much you could infer about your users based on some 100-200 data points collected over a period of 2-5 years. Weaponising that is not the complicated part, the data collection is.

minimizing employee access to U.S. user data and minimizing data transfers across regions – including to China.

It is "minimized", or in other words, accessible from China.

But I don't even think the real problem is videos of high school girls doing choreographed dances going to China. The problem is psyops and disinformation. I think it's much more likely TikTok could be, and probably has been, used to sow political discord. It's not hard to imagine the Chinese government "suggesting" to TikTok that they alter their algorithm to promote content that, say, discourages people from voting, or promoting political violence, or eschewing vaccinations.

A similar example, people should be able to freely assemble, corporations should not be able to form cartels.

No, nobody truly believes that. Whoever is trying to sell that is trying to manipulate you. We have exceptions, provisions and considerable case law which adds a lot of *) to the first amendment. The 'principles' you're referring to have never actually been a thing outside of political emotional speeches and Republican rallies.

None of us have been alive when America was in a hot war to see exactly how far free speech stretches when actual lives are at stake. We're in a cold war right now and people should adjust their expectations. I'm not shedding any tears when a foreign corporation has its 'free speech' rights restricted. If it wants free speech it should move to the USA.

Used to be we were talking about somebody on a soapbox in a park.

Now, it's a firehose of misinformation spread instantly to hundreds of millions. A tidal wave. A hurricane.

What should we do? How do we put the genie back in the bottle?

It's odd that the people who are so adamant that we can't ban 'hate speech' because 'it's a slippery slope' don't seem to care that the government banning us from viewing content is also quite a serious slipper slope.

>> But I come online and there's so much support for banning an app who hires lots of devs in Silicon Valley itself.

It's a net-positive for all the people working at Facebook + Twitter which is where the eyeballs will be diverted to.

And yes, other social media platforms have similar issues with algorithmic feeds, but they are currently a less clear national security threat. Though, one could argue they are radicalizing internal threats.

It still seems like security theater to me, which is particularly unfortunate because it is a real security threat.

Pretty soon you have "China doesn't let people say bad things about their leader, neither should we"

and

"China uses force to take things from other countries, why shouldn't we"

Your ideals and morals should be strong enough they don't change based on a bad actor.

  (B) EXCLUSION.—The term “covered company” does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.

As it should. Fortunately, this bill doesn’t do that. If ByteDance won’t sell, TikTok gets removed from app stores. TikTok.com will remain free to access.

The bill curtails distribution and amplification, not speech.

Now China has their own formidable EVs now. Would China say gave us shares or f** off to Tesla?

Dont get me wrong, I think TikTok is terrible. I won't use it. Ever. But that still doesn't mean it should be banned. Unless you want to ban all social media apps all at once. Probably still not something I would support, but I could definitely see proponents being able to form much more compelling arguments in favor of such an action.

As it stands right now, this makes zero logical sense.

Here’s a quote from appinchina dot com:

Currently, foreign companies are not allowed to directly publish their apps on Chinese Android app stores. This restriction does not apply to iOS or the Apple App Store in China. All foreign app companies must either have a Chinese entity or use an authorized local distributor to publish their mobile apps and games.

- Facebook+Twitter are US-based entities and have to follow US laws and regulations in a much more strict way than Tiktok

- They are not controlled by a politically-motivated adversarial government

You are also conflating apps "from a country" vs apps "under a country's gvmt control". I think most here would agree "apps from a plurality of countries" is a good goal to strive for, while "apps under a dictatorship's gvmt control" is not.

What amazes me is how people's view in these threads are for a ban. For a counter point, the EFF thinks congress should not ban apps[0]

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/congress-should-give-u...

Apart from the fact that to me an app is not speech, but that's an entirely different matter.

The US cannot request information on Chinese citizens in China because US companies are restricted from operating in China. They don’t have any significant data.

On the other hand China now has a very valuable and large presence in tiktok here in the US and can access any collected information it wants on Chinese citizens in the US and any other user. I imagine it doesn’t take a warrant either but I’m unfamiliar with their protocols.

So it’s likely not worse for you personally, especially if you’re a typical American who is unsupportive of their government and its foreign policy.

In all seriousness though, it isn't. People are generally simply trying to fit in, so hating on anything China is viewed as good and everyone sticks to it.

We know because of Snowden how the US government has access to all (most likely way more) of the same data they are now worried China has access to.

(B) a covered company that— (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of ...

Thanks for the link to the text.

The grandparent comment wasn’t asking about the likelihood of the US enforcing the ban (assuming the bill passes and TikTok refuses to divest). Obviously, the answer to that is somewhere near 100%.

The question was, assuming the bill passes, what’s the likelihood of TikTok deciding to divest (and thus remaining non-banned) vs. TikTok refusing to divest (and getting banned).