The problem is with the bill being legal.
For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?
For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?
It's just protectionism, like banning the Huawei phones (not talking about the infrastructure, that's different) or banning DJI drones. It just sounds better to mention national security than to say "we don't want others to do to us what we do to them, and we don't want them to compete with us".
Radio and newspapers(including internet articles here in general) are a one way street. With Tiktok, you not only get access to the users device via the app, but it is also a two way street. Tiktok gets to choose what it feeds you.
And what you describe is also true in a lot of countries(I can choose my medium). However, with newspapers, radio and television what you feed the population is readily visible to anyone. I can turn on the telly to see what is being streamed. This is not the case with an app. Unless the government watches you 24/7 and I doubt that. The costs are prohibitive. The thing that does exist is metadata. If I were to visit terrorist.com or bombmanual.org.uk I would make a list. But watching TikTok all that is being seen is me communicating with content-servers(here the subject that needs to be watched also changes from the user(me) to the proprietor(the company)) from them and protocolling the content of everything watched, unless you break encryption at scale, and monitor everyone is also prohibitive. Not to mention analysis of the content. So Tiktok is the perfect vehicle for subversion of a foreign nation if I want to play for time.
This is the government grabbing the authority to ban online services that they deem a national risk. The bill would honestly have been much more benign if it was a few pages spelling out a specific ban on TokTok. Hell, I don't think they'd even need a law to have Google and Apple pull the app from the app stores.
The internet broadened that and introduced apps. So I would see this as a correction rather than anything else.
If doesn't work in many cases anyway, Government has no way to track who is tuning in and listening to hostile radio broadcasts.
Even it might be hostile propaganda, First ammendment protects both publishing and consuming content, without any "national security" considerations. But US lawmakers are now seemingly keen to introduce such conditions in the publishing and consuming of content.
During the cold war it was perfectly legal for the Soviet Life magazine to be published in the US and for people to buy and read it.
First ammendment really does say that "Congress shall make no law .." without any caveats for national security or even war-time exemptions.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the SCOTUS.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-rul...
Much of the Patriot Act is probably unconstitutional but the government had 9/11 as a national security justification. No similar justification exists regarding TikTok.
The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.
In this -- extreme case -- the exceptional case of banning the company I think is warranted.
Secondly, half the country voted for DJT. Some insignificant percentage believed his lies and doubted science and such during COVID. Mistakes were indeed made by governments and scientists and public trust in them was strained ... but it proved to me, at least, that the general US public is not educated enough or are just too hopped on their social media opium to care enough to really weigh the threat that TikTok plays. And in this case I defer to the intelligence community and those who operate in the area of national defense to handle this. Seems enough of congress and the senate agree with me.
I'm hesitant to assume people are uneducated because of who they vote for. Talking about Covid and the pandemic response, a vast majority of our politicians and health leaders were knowingly spouting off lies in the name of what they thought was best for us. Again, I can't pin that on any one person, even Fouci. The system broke down and that says nothing meaningful about the average voter.
That said, an educated populace is a fundamental need in a democracy and one that the US founders were well aware of. We don't have that today, whether by incompetence or malice our major societal systems reinforce obedience and subservience. We need more people following their curiosity wherever it leads, and we won't get there by continuing to further lean into a distrust of the general public or by making everyone's daily lives more and more complicated and stretched with less time to spend however each person wants to spend it.
When has the US forced a private corporation to sell up via Congressional decree in peacetime?
Seems to me that Congress is betting that Bytedance will capitulate instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court.