ByteDance’s web of apps could get tangled up in TikTok ban
axios.com
axios.com
Factually incorrect. The sales must simply be to a non-foreign adversary country buyer.
ByteDance would not care, but would that "some company" care? Certainly.
If they are going to care and they think it may happen, does this make them reconsider whether to buy or not, and at what price? Sure.
You don't need a bench of NSA analysts to grow a spine.
edit: minor grammar fix
Not entirely his fault but they got the bomb on his watch.
(4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term “foreign adversary country” means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
(2) 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.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...
Not even close. Bills of attainders named a person and suspended their rights with no right to trial. (Analogous to proscription.)
The only thing this law has in common with those is it names a person, ByteDance, as an intended target of enforcement. The enforcement actions must still be done through the courts to which ByteDance retains access.
it's merely my personal opinion that the legislative act at-issue is 'tightly' drafted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
but a reasonable lawyer representing the interests of a challenger would be remiss not to at least submit the argument before the tribunal. even clear-loser claims should properly be reserved for any subsequent appeal.
(by the way, i'm trying to figure out where we've commented past each other and i think it might be with my use of the word 'tight.' i've meant to employ 'tight' idiomatically, like as in air- or water-tight. well drafted to say it plainly. i was simply playing off the "Nicely written..." comment to which i was replying.)
Edit:
Actually not even echoes. Just literally the "Axis of Evil"[1] redefined for 2024 geopolitics:
> In 2024, Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg and his predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned that China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, have been forming new alliance of tyrants.[6][7] The same states have been recognized as a new axis of evil by several American politicians, including Christopher Cavoli,[8] Mike Johnson,[9] and Mitch McConnel.[10]
> The term “adversary country” means the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation, or, as determined by the Secretary of Commerce, any other foreign nation, foreign area, or foreign non-government entity engaging in long-term patterns or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national or economic security of the United States.
Anyway, using the same logic, I can't wait for the UE to force US companies to sell Windows, iOS, AWS, etc. to European companies so those products can stay within our market.
Why do we want to be like that? To prove to everyone that that works?
No country has a right to do business anywhere and everywhere. I feel like people are really grasping at straws to squeeze this argument under some kind of "freedom of speech" or "freedom of action" umbrella, but those concepts have only ever applied to humans, not nations.
Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
(Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-int...
China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China.
Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening.
Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform.
Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.
If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia?
I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are:
• manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage);
• manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views;
• and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth."
China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc.
The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses:
• the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.)
• the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!)
• Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance.
(Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.)
> Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices?
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime.
Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.)
The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
I think we are going to disagree on this because you are playing geopolitics and I'm looking at this from the angle of individual freedoms. I don't think this is a bad thing - for geopolitical reasons, individuals are barred from owning nuclear weapons. This line is will be different for everyone. Personally I'm glad that there is a foreign owned media platform in the west that at the very least offered a different point of view. I don't believe the chicken littles that somehow China had come up with a magic algorithm that makes all the kids dumb (I think the DoEdu has a _far_ greater impact of the deterioration of schools in America than Xi).
My discomfort with the ban is, on its face, is that first, it's just protectionism, and second, by isolating tiktok it makes it clear that propaganda is fine, as long as were the ones doing the propaganda. I'd love to see better data protection regulation in the space - but it's clear that anything that would hinder Meta and Google's ability to vacuum up data in the rest of the world is "bad". Rules for thee and not for me.
>The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent.
This can be used an argument for banning all media. If your threat vector is that you fear that $enemy may use $platform to spread propaganda; I posit that banning $platform isn't an affective strategy. Russia already shown they could spread propaganda on US owned media sites. If the populace either isn't educated or, IMO, is primed to eat propaganda, that's a problem of local regulation.
On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled. We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
No, because to be clear, the worry is that people (mostly: young teens) don't have any conception of Tiktok being a CCP mouthpiece.
Anyone reading China Daily is going to realize it's a Chinese news source. And, as far as the American government is concerned, that is adequate to inform a citizen's decision-making with regards to how they interpret content from that source. People in the US don't tend to read China Daily — and it's not because the US government prevents them from doing so, or even tells them not to.
But there's nothing about Tiktok that looks Chinese. The content isn't Chinese; the UI isn't Chinese; it doesn't run sponsored ads from Chinese companies; even the PR announcements and interviews are usually done by Caucasian, ethnically-American "figurehead" employees. The whole company wants to portray itself as if it was an arms'-length American subsidiary of a foreign company, rather than a plain-old foreign company. There is no level of "media literacy" that you can apply to interacting with Tiktok itself, that would enable you to realize that Tiktok might slipstream CCP propaganda into your feed at some point. To realize that, you have to research the app "out of band" — which is research that the average citizen (but esp. a teenager) has no motivation to do.
To put this another way: the US government would likely be perfectly fine with Douyin being exposed to Western audiences; or with Tiktok and Douyin being merged together, such that logging into Tiktok shows both Tiktok and Douyin content (but presumably doesn't allow American comments to filter back up to Chinese posters, for CCP reasons.) Americans would sign up for this app, and immediately be barraged by the majority-Chinese content already on the platform — and so would quickly realize that this is a Chinese app, with all that that implies.
This is how, for example, WeChat is. Its design and messaging makes it clear that it's the international version of a Chinese app. The default phone country code on signup is +86, even for the release of the app published in the US App Store. When you see signs saying "we accept WeChat Pay", those signs are usually printed once in English and then again in Chinese, even in countries without much of a Chinese population. Etc. Nobody thinks that WeChat is an American company. And so the US government has never considered banning WeChat — and likely never would, even in wartime. They'd trust US citizens to avoid it of their own volition.
> On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled.
Not "that cannot be controlled"; specifically "can and likely will be controlled for malicious purposes, by a state actor who the US is planning to go to war with quite soon, and who has proven to have competent propaganda and cyberwar arms."
The US would never ban a media platform hosted in e.g. the UAE — no matter how much of a propaganda mouthpiece it might be for non-aligned interests — because the US has no plans to go to war with the UAE; and so the US has no reason to predict that the UAE itself would coerce a platform run by one of their own private companies, into doing psy-ops on Americans.
Likewise, the US has no strong desire to ban entirely-uncontrollable-by-anybody media platforms, like certain anonymous p2p chat clients. If there's no central lever that anyone can pull to turn the platform systematically toward being a psy-op machine (with nobody noticing), then it's not the concern of the US DHS to defend people from it.
> We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
China was right to ban Google/Meta, precisely insofar as China also believes war with the US is imminent. In the event of a war, these US-owned platforms would almost certainly be used by the US to manipulate Chinese citizens, in exactly the same way Tiktok would be used against US citizens. There's no reason not to use this tactic as part of a war, if you have the know-how. Both the US and China have the know-how.
(I hope people the world over wake up one day and realize that they the only "safe" social media platform, is one hosted in — and with legal ownership by a company headquartered in — a neutral country like Switzerland or Austria, that explicitly intends to never make war with anybody, and so has no need for a foreign propaganda arm!)
> individual freedoms
I would note that it won't be illegal to access Tiktok. Tiktok would still exist in every country other than the US. So the ban on Tiktok would be more like an EPA-mandated "hazard zone" fence around a site, than like an FDA scheduling of a controlled substance.
A hazard-zone declaration stops any business in the zone from operating there (illegal to make your employees work in a hazard zone); and also disincentivizes unknowing individuals from entering the zone by mistake. But you can just, like, climb the fence. You're not going to be arrested; a hazard zone is not inherently private property, so you are not trespassing by entering it. You're just (likely) being an idiot, and voiding any insurance claims you'll make. But maybe you have some very specific reason to go there. Maybe you're filming a documentary. You can still do that.
Likewise, it won't be illegal to download a VPN, set it to (any country other than the US), switch to that same region of the App Store, download Tiktok, and sign up / log into it. You're jumping the hazard-zone fence, but there's no crime inherent in that. As an individual, you're free to do so. It's just a fence, to keep out the people who don't have a motivation to be there that exceeds the motivation to ignore some scary warnings and climb a fence.
(Compare and contrast: quarantined subreddits, which are basically the self-policing version of this at a sub-platform level.)
Because Americans fought for the right to "be influenced" aka access information the government doesn't want us to see. No one forced Americans to use TikTok en masse. And no one hid from them the fact that it's a Chinese company.
We don’t. TikTok.com will continue to be freely accessible. That’s not true for Facebook in China.
"Foreign direct investment in China falls to 30-year low"
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-direct-investment-in...
I won't comment on whether prioritizing national security over being business friendly is right, I'm just saying there are consequences in China's case, and I believe there will be some consequences for the US as well.
"non-adversary", implying that China is your enemy, this doesn't make sense lol, pure propaganda at this point
China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply
TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned
The US is spreading some FUD to push some other laws and to prevent China from being leader in the US, they did the same with EU companies in the past, most notably French ones
Guess who is working on "we don't have WeeChat in the west, let's copy WeeChat for our everything app"
Yeah, you guessed right
That includes Twitter/X, so not sure what your YouTube video has to do with anything.
Are you implying that US companies should be above foreign local laws?
If you agree that companies should not be above the laws of the country they operate in, doesn't the same apply to ByteDance?
"TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned"
This is the final result of their noncompliance with local laws. Just as Twitter/X's noncompliance with censorship laws has resulted in their ban in China.
What's funny is the Oracle partnership demonstrated to the world that CIA/NSA had access to these servers for years, "Operation Decoy Tables", so i would say, the current events are quite beneficial for both parties, China and Rest of the World, as for the US, it's sad that all eyes are on TikTok, but that's what you get for only having 2 choice of the same cake for November (hey, that's the month of my birthday, the 5th too!)
Since we passed a law about murder and injury once we never need worry about safety again! Silly lawmakers worrying about lead paint and checks notes creating the FDA.
Similarly here to ByteDance, which has violated American laws for years and is now experiencing the consequences of its non-compliance.
So actually, my claim is true; your understanding of US law is what is lacking here.
I encourage you to understand this issue more deeply. But if it is evidence you lack, here it is:
A timeline of TikTok's history of reported security flaws, continual failures to fix them, and why it is currently in this situation: https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-timeline-ban-biden-india-d...
A list of countries that have already banned TikTok and their reasons for doing so: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/these-countries-have-alre...
Of course, that list does not include China itself, which also has TikTok banned locally.
TikTok ban is more about the Attention Wars.
Politicians in Democracies world over have walked into a trap by falling in love with Social Media.
How do you get noticed, in the absurd reality created by social media, where everyone is given a mic hooked up to the same sound system? No one can win in this game. Its an arms race to nowhere. Instead of recognizing that and creating a coordination mechanism for who gets the mic, politicians are currently doing two things -
1. Buying more Ads (just check the ever growing ad spends by political parties world over) - this basically means Democracy is for sale to the largest ad buyers
2. Arm twisting the platforms
We’re not. It’s a victory for national security. It’s a collective curtailment on freedom, similar to how we’ve agreed Americans are not free to finance terrorism.
So not a weird stance to take that US companies are not banned - they're not directly but indirectly it prevents many companies from anywhere who don't want to do business in China.
Subtle but important difference
Given that, would you say that Twitter/X is banned in mainland China?
I don't see how the ban being the result of its noncompliance with local laws doesn't mean it isn't banned.
I was just stating that in general a business needs to comply with laws where they do business. They can (and will) try to find ways around but it all comes back to enforcement.
If Twitter/X has no direct presence or interest in China, there is not much the local authorities can do to force them to comply with laws. If they own assets, employ people etc it looks very differently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
It's clearly a response to people getting unfiltered news from Tiktok that it otherwise not presented on mainstream media at all. It's why the ban was in the defense spending bill last week. Even outside the current Middle East conflict, the Ohio rderailment last year was extensively covered on Tiktok for 1-2 weeks before it really got any mainstream coverage.
The data privacy issue is a lie because Congress could've passed a comprehensive data privacy bill but didn't (and won't).
But the more compelling argument, and why I'm torn, is reciprocity of access to the Chinese market. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, etc are actually or effectively banned in mainland China. China's entry into the WTO sort of allows this and I understand why China does it but if the US took the position that access to the US market requires reciprocal access to the other country's market, that would be a position hard to argue against. I'm surprised that wasn't the argument made.
Tech giants have been very effective at arguing the "algorithm" decides what's shown to users and what isn't but the algorithm is merely a vessel for human decisions on what is a feature, what is ranked, etc. Facebook and IG manipulate their ranking too but they do it in a way compatible with US government policy so it isn't an issue. That's the real problem with Tiktok, as far as Congress is concerned.
This is an argument that is too complex to be wrap into the ban of a single company.
For instance the US car market has incentives helping cars under some specific conditions that conveniently put all foreign cars and truck at a disadvantage, if there's not an outright "built in the US" specification on it [0]. And China will have other indirect ways to protect specific markets (denying IP protection basically kills some industry sectors for instance). Then the US will raise tariffs, and China put other barriers etc.
Reciprocity is a moral assessment, international trade is just way too complicated for that IMHO.
On TikTok specifically, the US gov seeking control over a foreign asset is probably not a about following policies or not. Otherwise asking for an ownership change makes no sense: imagine a court deciding that FTX didn't follow banking policies so another entity buying it within a year is the solution. No, in these cases the problematic entity is disolved and people go to jail.
[0] https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-ta...
I disagree. There are several considerations here:
1. Free speech: a ban on a specific company is going to be challenged on First Amendment grounds. ByteDance has a plausible case here. The bar for government restriction on speech is necessarily high.
This raises the question of whether Congress actually wants this to pass or is this performative? That's an unanswered question. But a serious effort to clamp down on Tiktok in particular or supposed foreign control of speech in general would try to avoid 1A challenges.
2. To sell this to voters, putting it in terms of "I can't sell cars in China so we don't allow Chinese cars in the US" is easy to understand and it appeals to the innate sense of "fairness".
3. The reciprocity argument also falls outside of Free Speech issues. It's commerce not free speech, which courts are way more responsive to, even in cases where courts should see a 1S issue (eg various state laws banning anti-BDS movements).
> Reciprocity is a moral assessment, international trade is just way too complicated for that IMHO.
It's not. It's a core part of trade agreements, so much so that China needed a special dispensation in their WTO entry to avoid reciprocity requirements.
> ... the US gov seeking control over a foreign asset is probably not a about following policies or not.
Sure, it is. Meta or Twitter aren't under scrutiny. There's no effort around data privacy or how the algorithm works. Meta has gotten in trouble a few times for policy issues: eg racial discrimination in housing ads and allowing the import of drugs from Canada.
> imagine a court deciding that FTX didn't follow banking policies so another entity buying it within a year is the solution.
I don't have to imagine it. The FDIC takes over banks all the time.
Sorry for the poor wording, I was referring to China/US reciprocity being a more complicated issue than whether TikTok can be banned or not. The former will never be resolved, while the latter will just be a court case.
> It's not. It's a core part of trade agreements, so much so that China needed a special dispensation in their WTO entry to avoid reciprocity requirements.
I was mistaken about what reciprocity represents, and you're right, it is a core part of trade agreements, and a term of art meaning something more precise than the general understanding of it. TIL.
I'm looking at this as a primer: https://u.osu.edu/aede/2019/01/25/what-does-reciprocity-in-t...
But I couldn't find anything related to reciprocity regarding the entry of China to the WTO [0]. Even going through the report [1] it's just about China needing to open it's economy and accept foreign investment, including reworking it's IP laws and other pretty deep changes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_World_Trade_Orga... [1] https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/chinabknot_feb01....
These kinds of unrelated laws attached to bills that are likely to pass are called "riders", and they've been used since the early days of Congress. Attaching the TikTok rider to the defense spending bill doesn't necessarily mean that Congress sees it as related to national defense, just that the leaders saw it more likely to easily pass when attached to a defense bill.
Also, I'm positive that I heard about the Ohio derailment on Reddit before mainstream media coverage, and there's no way it wasn't on Twitter either. But those companies aren't targeted in this ban because they aren't owned by foreign adversaries.
Consider how small the effort was in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. How little effort Russia, allegedly, had to put into whatever happened the outsized effect. Even if that didn't change any specific election, and that's debatable, it's clear that a larger more organized effort could.
Why would any country allow any foreign actor have that kind of control over its voters?
Why would any country allow any foreign actor have that kind of control over its voters?
Sanctions hurt the people, legislation hurts the companies. When you actually want something, you use legislation. When you want to virtue signal and torture people, you sanction. Not that it works - I'm pretty sure sanctions lead to extremist views in the opposite direction than what was planned.
For example, country Monkeyland does a bad thing that they believe is good (ofc otherwise they wouldn't do it). You then sanction them, which hurts the poor (no money, less money due to sanctions), ill (no meds), and inconveniences everyone else and shows them that the rest of the world really is "evil", like their own government says.
Legislation gives an illusion of choice, and in these cases usually doesnt lead to pain and hurt.
More discussion since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40159845
license the algorithm to the buyer
(6) QUALIFIED DIVESTITURE.—The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that—
(A) the President determines, through an interagency process, would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(B) the President determines, through an interagency process, precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between the United States operations of the relevant foreign adversary controlled application and any formerly affiliated entities that are controlled by a foreign adversary, INCLUDING ANY COOPERATION WITH RESPECT TO THE OPERATION OF A CONTENT RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM or an agreement with respect to data sharing.
source: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...
It seems like it's worded to specifically target TikTok?
And yes it's illiberal but I don't see why liberal democracies should tolerate totalitarian regimes messing with our kids, voting public, monitoring our phones etc etc. The ByteDance CEO is clearly on a leash and can't speak frankly about lack of human rights in certain countries etc, they're not fit to operate like this.
I do appreciate the irony of Facebook et al doing much of the same things and I think that should be addressed too, but at least they're not under control of an antagonistic foreign government.
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(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.
Of course this doesn't work for the modern crack dealer, but they can sell the business to just about anyone, in any other country. Not much of a ban really, if free speech was really an issue.
How do we know that, though? I agree that Twitter, Reddit and YouTube "censor" things – though outside of government takedown orders, I'd just call it moderation. But it's not like ByteDance/the CCP publish their own government takedown orders, nor do they have anything similar to the Freedom of Information Act. In the end, we don't know what they could be censoring; we only know what they're not censoring.