Sure, but then why is electioneering banned by polling places? Or why is voter intimidation illegal? You have the draw the line somewhere.
> are implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically.
A democracy that is NOT a direct democracy is already admitting this. This is exactly the reason we have proxies in a representative democracy.
Because those things are not just speech - they're implicit or explicit physical threats.
America runs most of the world's social media platforms and expects other countries to be happy with that, but then panics the moment another country dares to offer them the same thing? I don't know which scenario is worse, the one where this is just an excuse for an America First trade war or the one where the US genuinely believes that controlling a social platform means you control the countries that use it.
I think it’s less about admitting this and more about the impracticality of having citizens vote on issues daily.
I think that is the case though. I will come off as arrogant and my lack of vocabulary might make it sound less elaborate, but a huge chunk of the population is not able or willing to so. This is why every time a country is facing a crysis, the populist politicians gain in popularity. People are already stressed out by their jobs, paying the bills, rising cost of living, so who wants to spend time and effort to research the causes of this, evaluate which proposed solution seems most realistic, what the tradeoffs are, compared to the dude who tells them that the problem is very simple and that he has the solution that is equally simple. It's the immigrants stealing the jobs, or the heat pumps forced upon them, or solar cells.
And it doesn't even need foreign social media to come to that.
You should invest a minute thinking about the problem. Pay attention to your own opinion: people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions. Focus on that. Now, consider that propaganda feeds false and deceiving information to the public. In some cases, the decision-maker is only exposed to propaganda. Even if that decision-maker is the most rational of actors, what kind of decisions can he do if they are only exposed to false and deceiving information?
There are plenty of reasons why libel and slander are punishable by law. Why do you think they are?
Also note: nobody is cracking down on libel and slander on social media because we consider internet publishers "common carriers" when infarct the should be held accountable for the things they promote.
The "common carrier" status of services which hold editorial control over the content that's pushed and promoted is highly dubious.
Any belief supported by lies and falsehoods cannot be described as truth. It's something else.
Zoom out to the cosmos and think about the truth available to different observers. This same principle holds across the board. You have to reconcile with each observer, and until you do truth is subjective.
I just have trouble stating that my objective truth is also someone else's objective truth. What if my information is "the Bible." You can split hairs with these people until you die of old age and they can technically be wrong but their truth can work for them.
Just like we have all kinds of wild unintuitive math proofs that are very enlightening once they are communicated to all observers. Newtonian physics are true until they aren't, the same as those Bible "truths."
Given the infinite probabilities of the universe I have trouble declaring a set of objective truths that are immutable and try to give people a pass on what they hold as true. Can anything be known? We settle on some truths that work for us in the little time we have.
Reminds me of a quote from 1984: "In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it." [0]
The problem is that people aren't ideal rational agents. Our collective reasoning tends to be heavily biased by the environment, and that there are actors who abuse this (by injecting ideas that indirectly help their agendas) for their personal gains. And in China's case, they want to undermine freedoms, including freedom of speech.
We can consider ourselves as "rational, critical thinkers" all we want, but we aren't as there are myriads of ways we're gullible in one way or another. Plenty of examples in our history books.
Still, I think that free speech is still more important, as it's the only way for a society to recover. With freedom of speech, an antidote (for a lack of better term) can eventually be found and injected into the public discourse, without it the future looks bleak.
The way I see it, we need to encourage improvement of education on social sciences, human psychology, game theory and so on, encourage critical thinking but forewarn of all possible fallacies, and hope that it will be enough and that the inevitable counter-reaction won't prevail and undermine the effort.
If TikTok is harmful to democracy, Fox News is more than an order of magnitude worse. A large portion of the electorate watches its insanity like a full-time job.
Most enemies of democracy, when measured by impact are 'domestic' and 'western', not some Chinese boogieman.
Malicious agents have no nationality, race or some single origin. All they share is the mindset and some values, willing to abuse the system for personal gains or flawed misbeliefs (for a lack of better word - beliefs that are known to contradict our collective scientific understanding of the world).
I’m constantly amazed by how easily even smart people will retreat into whataboutism, and this is the most polite way I’ve ever seen to call them on it.
I wanted to say that I believe it doesn’t matter who does something, only what they’re doing. So the same standards should be applied uniformly, irregardless of the actors’ identity.
Ideally, by no means entity X doing something we consider negative should absolve or justify entity Y’s negative (similarly or different) actions.
Personally I'm inclined to be more blunt and impatient. Whataboutism is intellectually lazy in the best case, in the worst case it means the interlocuter is manipulative or just actually operating at the emotional level of a 5 year old. Good people just don't like bad behaviour.. they won't wait around to find out which team committed the bad behaviour, and they won't refuse to fix 1 evil until another 2nd evil is addressed first, etc. Also relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow
Throughout history, big business and the mega-rich have regularly backed coups and authoritarians, compared to their democratic alternatives. It's a much better system for them than one where each person gets one vote, because there's a lot more of us than there are of them[1].
As for sworn enemies of democracy, I think the guy who launched a coup, as part of a broader conspiracy to steal the election when he lost would be towards the top of the list.
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[1] When times get tough, in a democracy, it becomes difficult for them to justify why they get to take three quarters of the pie, while the rest of us fight over scraps.
I think you mean Rupert Murdoch. He was born in Australia but naturalized as an American citizen, due to restrictions on foreign control of broadcast media.
If TikTok moved to control by an American citizen born in China, then that would comply with the PAFACA. If the people already controlling TikTok naturalized as American citizens then that would also comply (though that's obviously not going to happen).
Restrictions on foreign control of the highest-reach media are nothing new. The PAFACA simply updates them to reflect new viewing habits. "Foreign" continues to be defined by citizenship, not birthplace.
The very goal of this attack on the freedom of speech is to make people lean towards the easiest and "naturally occurring" pseudo-solution to make those bots shut up. Then abuse the same censorship mechanisms to control the discourse.
Sadly, I don't know how to solve this. Censoring speech is a non-solution. Building web of trusts will inevitably create even stronger information bubbles (making it easier to divide and conquer - we're seeing this happening).
Because people are not capable of being informed on every topic in the world.
Especially in a world that is increasingly more complex and nuanced.
And this ignorance has been demonstrated to be exploitable in order to tear apart societies.
If you can believe that lead pipes contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire… well, let’s just say the Internet is a series of tubes.
The concerns about TikTok merely as a propaganda platform are naïve and almost quaint when considering what might actually be happening.
A conventional U.S. corporation's motive is to generate profits. Efforts stemming from that motive have not always been in the public interest, and such cases are worthy of regulatory attention, but they typically do not present national security risks. In odd cases where pursuing profits could create national security risks, Congress has sometimes intervened, such as when Nvidia was banned from selling certain processors to certain countries.
A geopolitical entity is not a profit-motivated corporation, so the risk model is different, with national security factors being more salient.
Having the choice of two options at the ballot box, and social media meaning many people now form political opinions from anonymous accounts online does not fill me with confidence.
Facebook and Twitter have in the past banned networks of account for inauthentic behavior. In other words: individuals (and you can probably narrows this to residents or citizens) are allowed to speak their mind and try to convince others of whatever they believe, but it has to be them, they cannot use bots, multiple accounts etc. It's not an easy thing to filter, of course. But pretend that it was, would you agree with that approach?
It would be less of a problem if US platforms were allowed into China to influence the Chinese too.
>People who advocate for censoring foreign sources of influence are implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically.
Tbf, America did spend decades tearing down education to help support that conclusion.
And before you say, “but they’re not doing that”, remember that we’re discussing how this theoretically could be a bad thing.