What if no one misses TikTok?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The issue here isn't free speech, but control over what content is promoted, unless you think the CCP has the right to free speech in the US.
Maybe Washington should figure out a way to make fewer "Foreign adversaries" so it doesn't have to subvert the fundamental rights of its citizens.
It would not be OK, but not because it is China. It would not be OK because it is not OK for anyone to do that.
The more significant issue is that this is a bill of attainder. The fact that this was prima facia rejected by the courts is an indication that the NatSec state has corroded every branch of government, and we have a zombie government.
If Country A bans imports from Country B, it's entirely reasonable to respond in kind.
China infringing on the inalienable rights of Chinese citizens is not a source of strength. It's weakness. It hurts China.
Responding in kind is me responding to my neighbors fire by dousing the living room with gasoline and lighting a match.
Free trade should also be fair trade.
Personally I wouldn't really give a shit about TikTok if the Chinese market was actually at all open to US companies for this area (and if there were reasonable protections about personal data in the US overall).
TikTok isn’t being banned because of free speech or not but because the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues. China has recognized this as a threat and as such has banned foreign adversary social media companies from operating within its borders.
Likewise the United States has recognized that this is a serious threat as well and has sought to do the same.
Both countries claim to want to defend their systems of governments so it stands to reason they are just taking reciprocal actions here.
The “free speech” angle is just Chinese propaganda. We stop businesses from operating in the United States all the time and sanction companies and stop them from doing business within our financial network all the time. TikTok is just some random company and we can stop it from doing business here. Free speech isn’t a meaningful discussion point here.
Moreover it seems like security theater.
> Moreover it seems like security theater.
Meh. At a minimum it's just an economic reciprocation. If China doesn't allow our wildly successful social media companies to operate in China, we can as a matter of trade decide to stop their wildly successful social media company from operating in our country.
That’s a stupid trade policy.
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-...
> Supreme Court wrote in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958):
>"It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for advancements of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."
In a discussion where the First Amendment related to speech is at the center of the discussion, it's important for people to define what they mean by First Amendment Association versus Freedom of Speech as defined in the First Amendment, especially when the discussion is primarily framed as an issue relating to Freedom of Speech. If someone is asking for clarification of what someone else means, that adds to the discussion, it doesn't detract from it. We can't discuss things if people are unwilling to explain what they mean, particularly within context.
To that end, I'd encourage you to read the section on Limits on the Freedom of Association in the article you provided to see why that line of reasoning doesn't apply here.
> What are First Amendment Association rights?
As a substantive comment that adds meaningfully to the conversation? You think people believe you were asking the parent for clarification on their personal definition or usage of a word by broadly asking “what is x?”
Or are you suggesting due to you having other substantive comments elsewhere you are due the right to make unsubstantial comments that do not increase the level of the discussion?
I think you are being overly argumentative throughout the thread, the example I singled out being exceptionally bad.
Is that the case or is that just assumed what the government means when they say issues of national security? I thought they meant our devices could be hacked by malicious code in TikTok apps.
Which, if true, means that the US has been influencing the rest of the world for the past 20 years through all the other social networks.
The “personal freedom” part would be most immediately salient here.
Free speech wouldn’t apply if the app wasn’t in use already. But so many millions of Americans use the app already that it easily is about free speech as well.
We can hardly claim to have a democracy while acting like the population at large needs to be controlled in such a way. It's contradictory.
There's nothing contradictory about it because living in a democratic society doesn't mean that you have free reign to do anything that you want.
It's great. /s
Look: I live next to a reservation, where the US gov committed war crimes. There's a fort up the hill a quarter mile up from where I am, which was a "residential school" where the US gov put kidnapped children to "educate them".
You are 100% right that democracy can coexist with all manner of depravity.
We get it, yall can happily do enact horrors you feel like enacting on the rest of us and still enjoy feeling smug that we don't like it.
But that fact means that something being "democratic" does not mean that we should respect what you do just because you have a veneer of democracy across it.
I am profoundly grateful I have so many greater crimes commited by the US to contextualize what, in the big scheme of things, is a meaningless and goofy action. If I didn't know that they were spearheading the literal ecocide of the planet while incarcerating more people than have every been locked up, while simultaniously funding a genocide in Israel, I'd probably feel like this is some kind of espeically bad thing.
But it's not; it barely even registers once you start looking at the millions of people that the US has directly murdered in the last 250 years.
But It's Great! (tm)
Americans... sorry I meant United Statesians, are really bad people. We might even be the worst people on the planet by any conceivable measure.
Since we're so bad and we've murdered so many millions of people, I guess there's no redeeming us and anything good we've ever done was meaningless so I say we go ahead and ban TikTok as our final coup de grâce in this terrible and twisted timeline.
The fact that these people don't want to do that, and would rather rely upon walled gardens and algorithms to feed them short-form content to inform their opinions already implies a desire for paternalism in of itself. You look at some these people talking about they were "lied" to about how China is third-world dump (where did they get that idea?) and in fact it's bustling cities with skyscrapers, when there are plenty of youtube videos showing the modern Chinese cities since it's inception.
When they didn't try to verify their assumptions with a trivial 2 minute search should tell you that these people want to be propagandized and will always be propagandized. Whether it's American Propaganda or Chinese Propaganda or whatever, they aren't ever going to take the responsiblity to actually to challenge their own preconceptions, they'll just sway from one extreme of propaganda to the next.
These people, by rejecting the old internet and choosing walled gardens, they want to be treated paternalistically. That's why they'll always reference other walled gardens like Facebook or Instagram, they'll never reference older forums or image boards. And so if we don't take that role, well the CCP would be quite content to fill in.
The US (and every country on the planet) has rules and regulations around who can do business in their country and who their citizens may do business with.
If you want to argue that the U.S. shouldn't be able to prohibit its citizens from doing business with TikTok you should spend some time generalizing that argument and figuring out a good reason we shouldn't be able to prohibit Americans from selling weapons to Russia, or allowing Russian companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States to build weapons to send back to Russia. (or any other scenario you want to make up)
"Free speech" is not a good argument here. TikTok isn't a "free speech" platform. It's just a random company selling products and services in the United States.
Free speech doesn't protect free speech platforms: free speech protects every speaker, platform, and listener against regulations targeted on the basis of content/viewpoint.
OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time all three branches got the First Amendment wrong (one of the most popular 1A mantras — the one about fire in a crowded theater — came from dicta in what is now widely recognized as one such instance.)
Yes, speech does that. "The algorithm" is curation but the content we are talking about is mostly Americans talking to other Americans. The goal is to control and suppress that communication.
There are perfectly valid arguments to ban TikTok. And hey, there are arguments to be made that free speech shouldn't be absolute. But that doesn't fit into the American self image, so the argument must be obscured to reduce the dissonance. Your argument in particular maps perfectly to "Some kinds of speech are dangerous and people must be protected from them."
Whether people share memes or communicate American to American isn't material. We know this is true because a company with the same features and products can be shut down if it's discovered that the same company engaged in other illegal activities (let's say money laundering or human trafficking to make it clear) and so someone's First Amendment rights would be abridged by the shut down of the company.
TikTok is just in the same scenario and has now found itself afoul of US laws and regulations and has to adjust by selling itself or it can exit the market.
The other thing here is that you'd have to convincingly argue that people who have never used TikTok (me for example) have now had their First Amendment rights violated, but there has been no change in my First Amendment rights. I can still use my freedom of speech as I could before.
That was not the freedom of speech your supposed to hear on social media. That's why it's a threat. Be like Twitter and ban those accounts instead.
If this was a ban on an American company it would be a different story.
The youngest tiktokers weren't even born yet or were just infants/toddlers when Google first got banned there. They may not understand what's going on here because by the time they came of age nearly all major western social media sites were already blocked there and for them it's status quo now. From their point of view the US is being the censor. They are at prime age to go on red book out of spite, but I hope they'll eventually understand.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea that something that is normal in an authoritarian society is verboten and sacrilegious in a Democracy.
If that is the reason for the ban, namely that American citizens cannot discern propaganda from factual information themselves and as a result must have their information shaped for them to achieve or avoid certain political outcomes, then that is quite literally the same reason China has for controlling the information space
No offense but you did basically just say the same thing twice, just with a bit of a patriot-act touch up. China doesn't just ban things they "don't like". What they don't like is exactly what you just lined out
I don't think that you have to decry every horrible thing in the world to be upset when folks do things that you don't like to you.
This isn't really a good argument. Someone else being horrible isn't grounds to be horrible yourself. There are better arguments for banning TikTok, like protecting the youth from having their brains rotted out.
Foreign in UK, France etc means Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
The social graph isn’t a big deal if can be forced. People can just find the same people on the new thing. A few days of pain and its all fine, people who get locked out of their accounts or get banned do it all the time.
Because of the horrible UX of opening up this URL and literally the entire screen being covered by pop-ups... What the actual hell... Porn/warez sites in the 00s were better than this...
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
What if most people aren't addicted to them, and do simply find them useful and entertaining, and the hyperbole and discourse about how dangerous and addictive social media and "algorithms" are is a means to manufacture consent for the government regulating and controlling free speech?
What if it's a bigger problem that all the government has to do is gesture vaguely in the direction of China and many people will just roll over?
...I find it interesting to think about whether using something due to addiction means you wouldn't protest if it's forcibly taken away.
In other words, I wonder if people would protest if cigarettes were banned.
Not many people will protest a TikTok ban because it's largely happening to someone else and not very many people care about issues of free speech, as long as it's not happening to them.
I know what it feels like to be addicted- I used to drink quite heavily and often.
Why are you theorizing about people you don't know engaging in an activity which is foreign to you?
Can you state some of your media consumption preferences so we can deconstruct them and find their problematic aspects via a struggle session? If you're not up for that, why do you feel like it's okay to try and take that line with other adults?
It doesn't really make much "sense," of course. I'm just day dreaming. I find the USA gov and the Chinese gov to both be pretty evil. The other social media gets to stay, though, because they are all in the USA.
Obviously banning TikTok or other social media gets into free speech violation territory. But if I could just wave my magic wand and make things that I think are bad go away, I'd ban the whole lot
And for two of the biggest social media companies specifically, they'd get to stay anyway because they're paying off the POTUS.
Guy is ideologically opposed to TikTok and is reasoning backwards. I mean what’s more emblematic of that than writing a thinkpiece on a what-if?
> It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that if the ban takes effect, millions of screen-addicted TikTok users will start reading “Ulysses” and taking long walks in their spare time. But maybe it’s reasonable to see the shrugs surrounding TikTok’s disappearance and wonder if, after years of giving that app our attention, we’re ready to invest it somewhere else.
Buddhist monks of old would apparently position a novice in a cave by themselves, giving them nothing else to do than to meditate. He cannot possibly believe that the modern world minus Tik Tok is conducive to such apparently wholesome habits. There are dozens of alternatives in queue waiting to become the next pseudo-addiction.
I guess the magic of TikTok was not immediately apparent to lay people or those who did not use it regularly.
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
People will use something else.
Billions of humans have managed to live out their lives without short form video and will be OK
Our dependency on walled gardens goes deep and is actually a national security issues.
This 102 year old American veteran who fought in WW2 sure will miss it.
It’s in American security interests to limit CCP’s access to American location data and ability to pipe propaganda into our eyeballs.
But setting the ban to go into effect one day before the next President takes office is brazenly political and undermines the actually-important problem that TikTok represents.
When Twitter got weird, Bluesky was ready to come in as a total clone and succeed. I’m sure there are a dozen companies ready to make their case that they should replace TT…it’ll be fine.
every car app and toaster sells that stuff in the free market
propaganda is the point- or as importantly, the inability to hush or neuter 'anti-american' viewpoints
US govt has propaganda too: schools are now required to teach that "1,500,000,000 people suffer under communism"
That they say this is for "National Security" gives the game away.
Is that the case though?
I also think not so many people will miss TikTok-ers.
Absolute insufferable.
REDNote.
seo-speedwagon wrote (emphasis mine):
"Everyone’s joining 小紅書 and getting fully Xi-pilled."
This shows that seo-speedwagon is opposed to mainland China. Writing the name in traditional characters, which are used in Taiwan, is another barb of seo-speedwagon against mainland China and its government.
It’s hilarious that all these Redpillers are going on about how they can now communicate with and learn from the Chinese people they’re meeting on Red Book without ever considering why they couldn’t meet those Chinese people on Tik Tok in the first place and coming to the conclusion that this shows that it was the U.S. govt that was bad…
Yeah, the lack of logical thinking in this one instance and your response to it only adds to the evidence that your generation is cooked.
It's spite. Obviously. The point isn't that the CCP is better.
1) the novelty of talking to entirely new people, which is a relative rarity since the early, heady days of MySpace when social media was new and gardens felt much less walled. For Gen Z, it might actually be a first given their average age; or
2) how the lives of average people compare to theirs and compare to their prior notions of what they thought life was like
These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
Sadly, since Rednote is monitored and censored by the CCP, the novelty and depth of those 'wow, your country is really like that?' conversations is rather one-sided. You can bet if the conversation is going to paint a country in a negative light (e.g. Ambulance rides), that country probably isn't going to be China.
In the end, what was the real revolutionary propaganda that the American establishment is afraid of? True cost of living statistics.
Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities. The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
> The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want
Did you even read my comment?
> it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country
Wrong / highly misleading. Do you really think a country of 1.4 billion people can raise themselves out of poverty and overall dramatically raise the living standards for the masses without having a government that listens to the concerns of the people all across the country?
> If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors
I bet you the entire GDP of Canada that you don't know "what happened on June 4th".
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
What you are describing here, anti-establishment propaganda, is precisely the reasoning cited for the TikTok ban to begin with, and exactly the reason China has their firewall. So... uh... yeah?
Also VPN's are widely used in China so it really doesn't support your claim.
> Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities
Exactly! This proves how structurally powerless American freedom of speech is to enact real change. How is it that there were able to secure social services and unprecedented poverty reduction, or even had the political desire to?
> The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
This proves precisely zero things. This isn't even related to anything you said.
"The fact that we're discussing how broken healthcare is proves everything is fine!"
> GALLO SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.
Yes, a Chilean diplomat was seen as neutral, but was then debriefed by the Americans two weeks later.
This is active propaganda. You think the Gov spends billions on propaganda overseas and they make no effort internally? I mean think about it for a moment.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird#External...
That viral post is incorrect! Ambulance rides cost money in China! You are not immune to propaganda!
"In America, we have true freedom! I can stand in front of the White House and shout, 'I don’t like the President!' and nothing will happen to me."
The Chinese citizen thoughtfully replies:
"We have the same freedom in China. I can stand in front of Tiananmen Square and shout, 'I don’t like the American President!' and nothing will happen to me either."
if its looking like it wont be they gun you down. see: occupy wall st., unionization efforts
"American propaganda techniques? Sounds conspiratorial" says the American.
"Exactly," the Russian replies.
They want to use an app. These geopolitical-ideological fault-lines doesn’t matter.
But also I care a lot less about the CCP because they have very little impact on my day to day
https://x.com/OrganizerMemes/status/1879723864936370347#m Guess what! You also have to pay for an ambulance in China!
https://x.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1880176802993434698#m Wrong. Americans spend about 12% of their income on groceries and work less than the Chinese on average.
You are not immune to propaganda.