It's a mystery to me how anyone opposes getting TikTok from out of the CCP's control and indeed why it hasn't happened yet. Matt's CBS analogy is spot on.
Except the FCC operated under a constitutional theory that the limited spectrum availability justified regulation that wouldn't normally be allowed by the first amendment.
I'd obviously prefer TikTok have a different owner but I'm also concerned about the government exerting coercive pressure on a company because they fear they won't like what it might say. It's a hard problem.
After all, one could use much the same justification to go after the BBC as they are literally controlled by a foreign government.
Americans' free speech rights include the right to consume foreign communist propaganda. That's the explicit conclusion of Lamont v. Postmaster General.
There's obviously an argument here about banning Tik-Tok being a general free speech issue. But I don't think there's a question that Biden, especially with the backing of Congress, has the legal power to block or unwind China's acquisition of tik-tok
I remember the Exon-Florio amendment being cited a lot when Trump first tried to do this. Any law experts here want to chime in on if there will be any substantial legal challenge to a Tik-Tok ban?
That addressed a complete ban, but not the ownership of the service. I think Congress could force the Chinese government to unwind its ownership because the CCP has no constitutional right to own or operate anything within the US.
They have no more right to own the US subsidiary of Tik Tok than they would to own Boeing.
It wasn't an acquisition or investment. It didn't even have heavy US infrastructure operations until more recently, in an attempt to appease the US government under Trump & Biden.
Something that may be unclear is that you don't actually have to own or operate anything like TikTok for the benefit of US subscribers. Technologically, the sole thing you need to happen in the US is for Apple & Google to agree to distribute your App (which is a piece of software, the publication of which is subject to 1st amendment rules), and then that App can connect outbound to China or other points of convenience to retrieve instructions & content.
How many of the kids that called Congress last week understood that they were consuming foreign propaganda? A handful of every thousand? Conversely, how many per thousand threatened SUICIDE over a "ban" they were lied to about by the very company selling them an addictive app?
It's one thing for some rando commie to, on their own, seek out and consume commie propaganda. I have no beef with that.
It's a different thing for us to allow the commies to wholesale mail every schoolchild in the country a copy of Mao's Little Red Book with a bright unicorn on it saying "READ ME" and a bag of cocaine-laced candy where every wrapper promises more candy for every word you read.
Corliss Lamont wasn't shipping addictive substances. TikTok is an addictive substance.
yeah if this was china selling cigarettes in america I don't think people would be going to bat for them so much, even though it is largely the same thing
100%. It shouild be fully legal to say whatever wacky pro-commie stuff you want to. That's different than saying a foreign adversarial dictatorship should be able to operate within your country in a way that they would never reciprocate.
The last time Matt wrote on this topic, I started out like many people here today, with reflexive support for limiting or banning TikTok. After the comments back and forth, you convinced me that yours is the better argument. A belated thank you.
Divestment would certainly be an improvement on the status quo, but I personally am not crazy about a world that's just like ours except Meta controls the algorithmic feed rather than China. I'd support a ban on algorithmic feeds generally, which fixes the specific TikTok problem in a content neutral way while also attacking the root causes of the National Hangout Crisis.
I think there's a difference between voluntarily purchasing a newspaper and using an app that has been gamed to hold the attention of its users for as long as possible.
I, too, think we need to worry about what I think of as industrial psychology -- the manipulating of people to behave a certain way based on content and presentation of communications, informed by science.
But if that is something not covered by the 1st amendment, we have much larger problems with other entities doing the same, including the world's largest advertisers.
I'm uncomfortable with TikTok and what they're doing, but I'm even more uncomfortable with visiting consequences upon TikTok in isolation.
Yeah, big difference between an individual purchasing a book or listening to a CD, and having ByteDance slowly up-ranking videos that align with their interests and down-ranking videos that don't, while seemingly appearing like a neutral arbiter.
This seems like the obvious point that everyone is talking around. The issue is that he user isn't aware that they are consuming propaganda from a foreign government while they look at silly dancing cat videos. That is obviously not the case when a person decides to buy a foreign book or newspaper (where the foreign origin is presumably motivating the purchase).
"Although mentioned in a concurrence only, the “right to receive” was clearly acknowledged by the entire Court because the Court premised its holding on the addressee’s, rather than the foreign speaker’s, constitutional claim in order to avoid the difficult question of whether foreign governments have First Amendment rights."
The right to receive necessarily places limits on the ability to restrict transmission. (Notably, the postal regulation in Lamont didn't even actually prohibit Americans from receiving foreign communist propaganda, it just made it inconvenient for them to receive it, and yet the regulation was struck down.)
Oh, millions of ways. Someone who loves Chinese propaganda can pick up their favorite anti-Uigher video from whatever source provides it and repost it on Shorts or whatever substitutes for TikTok in the US. Or they can provide folks a link they can follow.
Like they said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Send a check somewhere? Idk. Let's say Bytedance went out of business—we obviously wouldn't have to send them a bailout package in order to preserve citizens' rights to get software from them.
Does "consuming propaganda" include sending back your location info, the locations of people you interact with, your wifi information, other sites you visit, and access to the camera and microphone that's almost always attached to you (edit) ...with most people having no idea they're allowing this?
Yes, and all of the actions taken there are done by the user's choice--everyone has the ability to not use TikTok. (I don't!) Perhaps a transparency argument could be made--but are there notifications saying "[Program] is asking you to grant permission to use [hardware]", like any other program?
Even if users are knowingly opting in (I doubt many know what permissions they gave the app) the US government has a good argument that the CCP can't have access to that information. Nobody opted in to being tracked or targeted by China.
The problem is that the subjects, often children, do not know what they are consenting to and that often times the company is lying about what they are tracking/doing.
Getting location data is harder these days than it used to be and you do have to explicitly grant permission. Accessing the camera and mic also require an explicit permission grant and they display on the phone when active.
This kind of data is a commercialized product sold to anyone anywhere, if they're willing to buy it in enough volume.
If this is the real issue, we need to pass laws about this that impact all businesses, including domestic. This kind of data is literally too valuable for any collection of it not to get sold, stolen, leaked, etc. The only working policy is to ban its creation and accumulation.
A lighter weight version of GDPR for the US might not be a bad idea, or some sort of data sovereignty law.
But what does the CCP care? They're not worried about US law. What are we gonna do? Right now, groups with explicit permission from the CCP are illegally attacking networks in the US. What are we doing about it?
I think we can go back and forth all day here but to me it seems patently obvious that forcing tiktok to change ownership would, in fact, do precisely zero to deny any person the right to consume anything that is currently available to consume on TikTok. That's kind of the point of the first half of the article. You absolutely can find and consume foreign communist propaganda, and even an outright ban of tiktok would not change that. But we aren't even talking about banning them.
That's a more complicated question than you might think. Yes it's true that non-us person's don't have as much first amendment protection it's also true that the BBC or al-jazerra has some degree of 1st amendment protection, e.g., if their reporters discovered some scandal and tried to report on it and the government tried to prevent them from doing so.
Remember that the CCP doesn't directly own bytedance and while I appreciate the concerns here this power seems to be being used with discretion (eg it's not a generic across the board rule about foreign or even Chinese control of social media companies). Even if I like this outcome I don't know if I'll like the next application. If the BBC is negative about Trump can he use the same mechanism to force a sale of their us assests? What about al-jazerra?
I mean the BBC is outright owned by a foreign power and al-jazerra effectively is ...and as the world becomes more globalized probably more and more major media companies will have substantial (perhaps even majority) non-us control.
And sure, if you could guarantee it would only happen in cases like this that would be great. But that's always the thing. What if next time it's a president threatening to do something similar but with the implicit message that they'll forget about it if the coverage of them is more favorable?
I don't have a good answer. I'm also very worried about CCP pressure on our media ecosystem. But I do know that it's not obvious and simple.
We have to distinguish the right of foreign powers to own media distribution platforms from the rights of platforms that operate in the US to say what they want.
With the former, I agree that action against TikTok, even if appropriate, raises the risk that US government action will be used against other foreign-controlled media platforms for worse or even venal reasons. This isn’t a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of weighing pros and cons. I find the scales heavily weighted toward banning CCP control of TikTok.
1. It is well established that China exerts control over the behavior of media companies. The CCP has a seat on the board of the parent company of all ByteDance/TikTok entities. In China, executives have no shield against personal civil or criminal liability for corporate actions, so they are very sensitive about actions that would anger the CCP. Although the US-China relationship is complicated, it’s fair to consider it hostile in this context. Any argument that assumes that TikTok won’t bias media coverage to anti-US ends is a straw man.
2. China has effectively banned US social medial companies from operating in China. From an international affairs standpoint, responding with reciprocity is the right course. It’s mind boggling that we haven’t done so already, although the issue has been that China only had a viable social network with US penetration very recently (as WeChat was poorly adopted in the US). This tit-for-tat dynamic already exists with chips, so it only escalates our conflict with China in degree, not in kind.
3. In a hypothetical world where no foreign media/social network ownership of US operations was allowed, would we pass a law allowing TikTok to operate? No way whatsoever. And TikTok wouldn’t be the first one allowed in any case.
4. As you say, if the law gave executive authority to ban foreign-owned media organizations, I’d find it much harder to support a ban. But it doesn’t. Given the controversy about banning this edge case, it would be difficult to ban others. This is a judgment call and reasonable people could disagree.
I think that public policy should support the operation of foreign-owned media organizations in the US. It leads to a richer information environment and creates market competition for US firms. The biggest loss if TikTok were shut down would be the death of the first viable facebook competitor since Instagram. given the immense barriers to starting social networks, I take this seriously. I just don’t think that the world with only US-based firms is so bad that it outweighs the risk of having a major media platform usable by a foreign adversary for propaganda.
You raise a critical question about what the US government’s power to control the speech of foreign-controlled media. Can anybody explain what rights are afforded today? I find the concept of extending constitutional protections to non-US citizens to be unwise and dont’ think we should pick and choose which protections are extended or not. Extending rights to companies is much more complicated. Any policy that limits corporate rights would diminish foreign investment. Therefore, the laws should be as narrow as possible.
In this case, nobody is advocating for laws that allow the government to exert pressure on something like Al Jazeera. if that happened, my view may change.
If Americans are stupid enough to elect Trump and he goes after the BBC or al-Jazeera after Biden forces the sale of TikTok, well, that would be bad, but not a bad enough scenario to change my opinion of what Biden should do about TikTok. On net we would still be better off to stop giving China an open path for propaganda.
Except that Matt himself has suggested before that: (1) Trump will win the election, (2) Republicans will win both houses of Congress, and (3) Senate Republicans will get rid of the filibuster for regular legislation . . . .
The US already has broad laws that allow for the regulation of foreign investment under the rubric of national security. Congress absolutely has the power to ban BBC broadcasts in the US for that purpose.
"In that case, people who currently love TikTok will migrate to the copycat short form video products from Meta and YouTube, and the world will go on. "
Because it's a bad analogy, as Peter points out. During the Cold War, I could've, through a wire service, gotten Pravda. Now technologically, that's very different from a social media app, but it isn't the same as owning a broadcast station.
Pravda never used PBS to ship millions of American children hammer-and-sickle-branded cocaine candies, either.
Ed: They also never posed a risk of attaching those candies to a video about Afghanistan telling American schoolchildren to call their representatives and Senators to protest Americans shipping weapons to terrorists like OBL.
So why do you without the presentation of any public evidence at all believe them? Like all the intelligence institutions who say this have presented no public evidence and have a track record of saying things like Victory in Vietnam is just a few months away and Iraq is developing WMD.
I think if you wanted to substantially disrupt my life and shake up my arrangements you should have to present some actual evidence of actual harm and not just fear monger.
Buying an American TV station is foreign investment in a domestic asset, specifically a domestic asset that has exclusive control of a physically limited asset that government policy has regarded as requiring maximum utility for the public benefit.
Online services aren't constrained by location or spectrum policy, which gets back to just being plain censorship.
The location of ownership does not impact the reach of the service. The location of the engineers does not impact the reach of a service.
There are equipment manufacturers who operate exclusively in China and whose products I might purchase. They have support websites. They have no US entity or engineers. I can access their support websites just fine.
Can you find any example of a website available in any two other jurisdictions on the planet, such website wanting to be broadly available, which is not available in the US? I suspect not. The US has literally never done national level blocking in the network layers to prevent access to foreign services on the internet.
>>The location of ownership does not impact the reach of the service. The location of the engineers does not impact the reach of a service.
That's irrelevant.
The location of the ownership and the engineers impacts which country's POLICE get to arrest them for operating the service in ways counter to the country's interest.
America's adversaries are using its weaknesses against it. The survival of the American system is at stake in the upcoming election, in no small part thanks to this. It's sad that (some) Americans are so determined to ignore this uncomfortable reality that they're willing to argue America should treat close allies the same as it does its leading adversaries.
In my mind, if we are an America fearful enough to start making laws motivated by the desire to control information content from our rivals in media, then the American system has already failed.
Allowing anyone, including our rivals, to inject political speech into our infosphere is a good principle actually and asserting a right to control it destroys the American system you are seeking to protect.
I think it’s useful to distinguish when a government wants to control information content and when a government wants to prevent a hostile nation for controlling information content.
A hostile X is controlling information content somewhere in the US. I'm quite sure the first amendment protects this arrangement whatever X is - citizen, corporation, organization, foreign national, foreign organization, or foreign nation as long as it doesn't fall afoul of the narrow exceptions that exist.
When did we officially declare China 'hostile'? What was the legal process for that? Because we literally have the world's largest trading relationship with them, so it seems a little odd.
Russia is hostile- can we ban Russia Today? Russian TV channels in general? Pravda? Nabokov? The Nutcracker? Is there a limiting principle here anywhere?
I think the argument is that "if Biden can do this with TikTok, then Trump can do this with BBC America [probably because Keir Starmer said something mean about him]"
I'd say even if this would happen, it would be an acceptable (albeit grotesque) tradeoff because PRC-controlled TikTok is a far greater threat to the US than BBC America is a positive contribution.
Yeah, I can see that argument, but that's a "we need to express the distinction that I already feel between the two cases in a legally-robust way" type argument, rather than a "the only distinction here is between the two political sides" type argument.
There might well be an argument along the lines of this, though: ByteDance owning TikTok and being influenced by the CCP is difficult to distinguish in law from other foreign ownership of media and I'd prefer to keep Spotify up even at the expense of putting up with Chinese ownership of TikTok than to bring both down. A law that specifically names TikTok / ByteDance will fall under the constitutional prohibition on Bills of Attainder.
I don't think that's right; I think legislation can be drafted that specifies the cases where a ban on foreign ownership is necessary and those where it isn't, but I think that's a legitimate case to make.
Do you see any differences between the UK and the CCP? Any differences with the type of relationship US has with either country? Including subpoena power and whistleblower protections? Do you remember, even with those relationships, how difficult it was to get to the bottom of the Cambridge Analytica issue?
I obviously see a difference which is why I raised them as a counterpoint. I do worry about the CCP controlling TikTok.
But it makes me nervous to give the government that kind of discretionary power.
I mean the reason I believe the ACLU did the right thing in defending the Skokie Nazis isn't because I don't disapprove of Nazis but because I worry about how that power might be used in other cases.
As I said, there are tough concerns on both sides here but the OP tried to suggest it was crazy not to support this and I think it's alot more complex than that.
It's really not that tough to ask Tiktok to demonstrate their connections with the CCP, and what involvement they have in editorial power, and then when they refuse to comply or are outright dishonest, say "sorry, you're being evasive, and can't do business here."
That's not the point. The point is that power could be used used elsewhere once it exists. I'm not doubtful of the threat from the CCP, I'm doubtful of the bright line rule which prevents this from being used to pressure the many foreign media orgs (BBC Al-jazerra) that also have foreign government influence to give the kind of coverage the party in power wants.
I mean it's even more apparent that Qatar influences the content of al-jazerra even if on most issues it does good journalism. Hence a complicated issue.
Are you literally just making a slippery slope argument and clutching your pearls about the path to serfdom?
(If you're so concerned about power existing and being misused, it doesn't seem coherent to just be fine ceding power away to other governments by preferring inaction.)
For the record, I agree that it's complex, and I agree with your concerns, I just come down on the other side.
But those concerns are precisely why I come down on this as a limited enterprise. As Charles mentioned above, China actually IS designated as a "foreign adversary". I think we delegate plenty of MUCH scarier powers with MUCH steeper slippery-slopes to our government. I'm OK with this one, especially given the bipartisan agreement.
I think it's MUCH scarier that the CCP (through TikTok) was able to alarm so many users with that push notification on such short notice. They *flooded* Congressional offices, and they weren't even trying that hard.
As Agent K said, "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." I rate the TikTok threat as closer to "shouting fire" than mere unpopular speech that needs to be defended.
What I don't trust is our government to never apply this kind of power against sources like the BBC or other reputable news orgs that have foreign control.
The form of the argument is: yes CCP control over TikTok is bad but if you let the government have discretionary power here they might use it in cases where it's not so good.
But the thing is, no one *IS* giving the government "discretionary power".
It's *one* bill narrowly targeted at *one* company, a bill which is only viable because of the sheer bipartisan majority behind it.
Any similar campaign directed against, say, the BBC, would immediately run into partisan obstruction -- IE the Democrats would filibuster it into oblivion if it even made it out of committee. Ditto, sad to say, if Dems tried to ban RT with a narrow ban of their own.
The only thing that's making this remotely viable is the exceedingly rare bipartisan majority. To me, that doesn't scream "abuse of power" or even "discretionary power", it screams "just this once, and for a DAMNED good reason", the same way we treat our sanctions on, say, Putin's oligarchs. It's not like we've gone and sanctioned half of London in the past decade of Putin's oligarchs using it as their personal playground.
The BBC isn't a mouthpiece for Rishi Sunak or whomever is in charge of Parliament. They're an incredibly reputable news source that doesn't hesitate to criticize their government.
Right...so it would be bad to do the same to the BBC. Glad we agree. But the lack of a bright line rule here bothers me. Seems like there is always the risk that if you do this for TikTok and the BBC start saying things that outrage the wrong people you could bring the same kind of threat to bear.
And al-jazerra is exactly the kind of case that makes it even more difficult. Qatar very obviously has some control over what it says but it's mostly free to do good journalism.
I don't want it to be the case that al-jazerra feels that it's more likely to face a similar punishment if it has negative coverage of the party in power and without a bright line rule that seems like a potential danger.
It's a mystery to me how anyone opposes getting TikTok from out of the CCP's control and indeed why it hasn't happened yet. Matt's CBS analogy is spot on.
Except the FCC operated under a constitutional theory that the limited spectrum availability justified regulation that wouldn't normally be allowed by the first amendment.
I'd obviously prefer TikTok have a different owner but I'm also concerned about the government exerting coercive pressure on a company because they fear they won't like what it might say. It's a hard problem.
After all, one could use much the same justification to go after the BBC as they are literally controlled by a foreign government.
So… you just read entirely past the whole example of a Soviet state media company buying an American TV station?
National security is a thing. WE have a right to free speech within our shores. Hostile powers DON’T.
Americans' free speech rights include the right to consume foreign communist propaganda. That's the explicit conclusion of Lamont v. Postmaster General.
There's obviously an argument here about banning Tik-Tok being a general free speech issue. But I don't think there's a question that Biden, especially with the backing of Congress, has the legal power to block or unwind China's acquisition of tik-tok
I remember the Exon-Florio amendment being cited a lot when Trump first tried to do this. Any law experts here want to chime in on if there will be any substantial legal challenge to a Tik-Tok ban?
There already is!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/victory-montanas-unprecedented-tiktok-ban-unconstitutional
That addressed a complete ban, but not the ownership of the service. I think Congress could force the Chinese government to unwind its ownership because the CCP has no constitutional right to own or operate anything within the US.
They have no more right to own the US subsidiary of Tik Tok than they would to own Boeing.
It wasn't an acquisition or investment. It didn't even have heavy US infrastructure operations until more recently, in an attempt to appease the US government under Trump & Biden.
Something that may be unclear is that you don't actually have to own or operate anything like TikTok for the benefit of US subscribers. Technologically, the sole thing you need to happen in the US is for Apple & Google to agree to distribute your App (which is a piece of software, the publication of which is subject to 1st amendment rules), and then that App can connect outbound to China or other points of convenience to retrieve instructions & content.
How many of the kids that called Congress last week understood that they were consuming foreign propaganda? A handful of every thousand? Conversely, how many per thousand threatened SUICIDE over a "ban" they were lied to about by the very company selling them an addictive app?
It's one thing for some rando commie to, on their own, seek out and consume commie propaganda. I have no beef with that.
It's a different thing for us to allow the commies to wholesale mail every schoolchild in the country a copy of Mao's Little Red Book with a bright unicorn on it saying "READ ME" and a bag of cocaine-laced candy where every wrapper promises more candy for every word you read.
Corliss Lamont wasn't shipping addictive substances. TikTok is an addictive substance.
yeah if this was china selling cigarettes in america I don't think people would be going to bat for them so much, even though it is largely the same thing
Because cigarettes are not speech . . . .
Still mulling over this comment, but I do love your way with words. You definitely woke me up on a sleep post-clock-change Tuesday morning.
Haha, cheers! Glad to deliver.
100%. It shouild be fully legal to say whatever wacky pro-commie stuff you want to. That's different than saying a foreign adversarial dictatorship should be able to operate within your country in a way that they would never reciprocate.
The last time Matt wrote on this topic, I started out like many people here today, with reflexive support for limiting or banning TikTok. After the comments back and forth, you convinced me that yours is the better argument. A belated thank you.
See: https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/data-privacy-is-not-the-issue-with?r=gvwl&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=6169327
I still want it to go away but I don't know how to do that and properly support free speech.
Divestment would certainly be an improvement on the status quo, but I personally am not crazy about a world that's just like ours except Meta controls the algorithmic feed rather than China. I'd support a ban on algorithmic feeds generally, which fixes the specific TikTok problem in a content neutral way while also attacking the root causes of the National Hangout Crisis.
I mean you can always lie to yourself about it. Lots of people do that when they hold contradictory beliefs.
Have it be owned by an American entity and let them publish whatever they want?
Because you don't have to support the "free" speech of a foreign government.
I think there's a difference between voluntarily purchasing a newspaper and using an app that has been gamed to hold the attention of its users for as long as possible.
I, too, think we need to worry about what I think of as industrial psychology -- the manipulating of people to behave a certain way based on content and presentation of communications, informed by science.
But if that is something not covered by the 1st amendment, we have much larger problems with other entities doing the same, including the world's largest advertisers.
I'm uncomfortable with TikTok and what they're doing, but I'm even more uncomfortable with visiting consequences upon TikTok in isolation.
Yeah, big difference between an individual purchasing a book or listening to a CD, and having ByteDance slowly up-ranking videos that align with their interests and down-ranking videos that don't, while seemingly appearing like a neutral arbiter.
This seems like the obvious point that everyone is talking around. The issue is that he user isn't aware that they are consuming propaganda from a foreign government while they look at silly dancing cat videos. That is obviously not the case when a person decides to buy a foreign book or newspaper (where the foreign origin is presumably motivating the purchase).
"Although mentioned in a concurrence only, the “right to receive” was clearly acknowledged by the entire Court because the Court premised its holding on the addressee’s, rather than the foreign speaker’s, constitutional claim in order to avoid the difficult question of whether foreign governments have First Amendment rights."
(https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-general/#:~:text=Postmaster%20General(1965),-Written%20by%20Anuj&text=The%20Supreme%20Court%20decision%20in,political%20propaganda%E2%80%9D%20through%20the%20mail.)
Americans have the right to receive Chinese propaganda. That doesn't mean China has the First Amendment right to broadcast said propaganda.
The right to receive necessarily places limits on the ability to restrict transmission. (Notably, the postal regulation in Lamont didn't even actually prohibit Americans from receiving foreign communist propaganda, it just made it inconvenient for them to receive it, and yet the regulation was struck down.)
How can they receive Chinese propaganda if it can't be transmitted to them?
Oh, millions of ways. Someone who loves Chinese propaganda can pick up their favorite anti-Uigher video from whatever source provides it and repost it on Shorts or whatever substitutes for TikTok in the US. Or they can provide folks a link they can follow.
Like they said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Send a check somewhere? Idk. Let's say Bytedance went out of business—we obviously wouldn't have to send them a bailout package in order to preserve citizens' rights to get software from them.
Does "consuming propaganda" include sending back your location info, the locations of people you interact with, your wifi information, other sites you visit, and access to the camera and microphone that's almost always attached to you (edit) ...with most people having no idea they're allowing this?
Yes, and all of the actions taken there are done by the user's choice--everyone has the ability to not use TikTok. (I don't!) Perhaps a transparency argument could be made--but are there notifications saying "[Program] is asking you to grant permission to use [hardware]", like any other program?
"by the user's choice"
You mean the same BS "choice" we have to implicitly "sign" any old psychopathic corporation's EULA merely by using their services?
The journalists that had their accounts and phones targeted by the CCP did not opt into that.
Even if users are knowingly opting in (I doubt many know what permissions they gave the app) the US government has a good argument that the CCP can't have access to that information. Nobody opted in to being tracked or targeted by China.
The problem is that the subjects, often children, do not know what they are consenting to and that often times the company is lying about what they are tracking/doing.
Getting location data is harder these days than it used to be and you do have to explicitly grant permission. Accessing the camera and mic also require an explicit permission grant and they display on the phone when active.
This kind of data is a commercialized product sold to anyone anywhere, if they're willing to buy it in enough volume.
If this is the real issue, we need to pass laws about this that impact all businesses, including domestic. This kind of data is literally too valuable for any collection of it not to get sold, stolen, leaked, etc. The only working policy is to ban its creation and accumulation.
FWIW, Biden issued an executive order banning the sale to certain countries. How well that can be enforced is a different question of course.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-executive-action-personal-data-protections-china-ea0fe0af31dc26b254e2724c8e53867f
A lighter weight version of GDPR for the US might not be a bad idea, or some sort of data sovereignty law.
But what does the CCP care? They're not worried about US law. What are we gonna do? Right now, groups with explicit permission from the CCP are illegally attacking networks in the US. What are we doing about it?
I think we can go back and forth all day here but to me it seems patently obvious that forcing tiktok to change ownership would, in fact, do precisely zero to deny any person the right to consume anything that is currently available to consume on TikTok. That's kind of the point of the first half of the article. You absolutely can find and consume foreign communist propaganda, and even an outright ban of tiktok would not change that. But we aren't even talking about banning them.
That's a more complicated question than you might think. Yes it's true that non-us person's don't have as much first amendment protection it's also true that the BBC or al-jazerra has some degree of 1st amendment protection, e.g., if their reporters discovered some scandal and tried to report on it and the government tried to prevent them from doing so.
Remember that the CCP doesn't directly own bytedance and while I appreciate the concerns here this power seems to be being used with discretion (eg it's not a generic across the board rule about foreign or even Chinese control of social media companies). Even if I like this outcome I don't know if I'll like the next application. If the BBC is negative about Trump can he use the same mechanism to force a sale of their us assests? What about al-jazerra?
I mean the BBC is outright owned by a foreign power and al-jazerra effectively is ...and as the world becomes more globalized probably more and more major media companies will have substantial (perhaps even majority) non-us control.
And sure, if you could guarantee it would only happen in cases like this that would be great. But that's always the thing. What if next time it's a president threatening to do something similar but with the implicit message that they'll forget about it if the coverage of them is more favorable?
I don't have a good answer. I'm also very worried about CCP pressure on our media ecosystem. But I do know that it's not obvious and simple.
The bill is about hostile foreign powers, which is a set officially composed of Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China.
We have to distinguish the right of foreign powers to own media distribution platforms from the rights of platforms that operate in the US to say what they want.
With the former, I agree that action against TikTok, even if appropriate, raises the risk that US government action will be used against other foreign-controlled media platforms for worse or even venal reasons. This isn’t a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of weighing pros and cons. I find the scales heavily weighted toward banning CCP control of TikTok.
1. It is well established that China exerts control over the behavior of media companies. The CCP has a seat on the board of the parent company of all ByteDance/TikTok entities. In China, executives have no shield against personal civil or criminal liability for corporate actions, so they are very sensitive about actions that would anger the CCP. Although the US-China relationship is complicated, it’s fair to consider it hostile in this context. Any argument that assumes that TikTok won’t bias media coverage to anti-US ends is a straw man.
2. China has effectively banned US social medial companies from operating in China. From an international affairs standpoint, responding with reciprocity is the right course. It’s mind boggling that we haven’t done so already, although the issue has been that China only had a viable social network with US penetration very recently (as WeChat was poorly adopted in the US). This tit-for-tat dynamic already exists with chips, so it only escalates our conflict with China in degree, not in kind.
3. In a hypothetical world where no foreign media/social network ownership of US operations was allowed, would we pass a law allowing TikTok to operate? No way whatsoever. And TikTok wouldn’t be the first one allowed in any case.
4. As you say, if the law gave executive authority to ban foreign-owned media organizations, I’d find it much harder to support a ban. But it doesn’t. Given the controversy about banning this edge case, it would be difficult to ban others. This is a judgment call and reasonable people could disagree.
I think that public policy should support the operation of foreign-owned media organizations in the US. It leads to a richer information environment and creates market competition for US firms. The biggest loss if TikTok were shut down would be the death of the first viable facebook competitor since Instagram. given the immense barriers to starting social networks, I take this seriously. I just don’t think that the world with only US-based firms is so bad that it outweighs the risk of having a major media platform usable by a foreign adversary for propaganda.
You raise a critical question about what the US government’s power to control the speech of foreign-controlled media. Can anybody explain what rights are afforded today? I find the concept of extending constitutional protections to non-US citizens to be unwise and dont’ think we should pick and choose which protections are extended or not. Extending rights to companies is much more complicated. Any policy that limits corporate rights would diminish foreign investment. Therefore, the laws should be as narrow as possible.
In this case, nobody is advocating for laws that allow the government to exert pressure on something like Al Jazeera. if that happened, my view may change.
If Americans are stupid enough to elect Trump and he goes after the BBC or al-Jazeera after Biden forces the sale of TikTok, well, that would be bad, but not a bad enough scenario to change my opinion of what Biden should do about TikTok. On net we would still be better off to stop giving China an open path for propaganda.
“If the BBC is negative about Trump can he use the same mechanism…?”
That mechanism being Congress passing a bill that he wants to sign. Trump couldn’t do it on his own.
Except that Matt himself has suggested before that: (1) Trump will win the election, (2) Republicans will win both houses of Congress, and (3) Senate Republicans will get rid of the filibuster for regular legislation . . . .
Maybe that will come to pass. So what?
Congress can't stop me from watching the BBC either.
The US already has broad laws that allow for the regulation of foreign investment under the rubric of national security. Congress absolutely has the power to ban BBC broadcasts in the US for that purpose.
"In that case, people who currently love TikTok will migrate to the copycat short form video products from Meta and YouTube, and the world will go on. "
Because it's a bad analogy, as Peter points out. During the Cold War, I could've, through a wire service, gotten Pravda. Now technologically, that's very different from a social media app, but it isn't the same as owning a broadcast station.
Pravda never used PBS to ship millions of American children hammer-and-sickle-branded cocaine candies, either.
Ed: They also never posed a risk of attaching those candies to a video about Afghanistan telling American schoolchildren to call their representatives and Senators to protest Americans shipping weapons to terrorists like OBL.
So why do you without the presentation of any public evidence at all believe them? Like all the intelligence institutions who say this have presented no public evidence and have a track record of saying things like Victory in Vietnam is just a few months away and Iraq is developing WMD.
I think if you wanted to substantially disrupt my life and shake up my arrangements you should have to present some actual evidence of actual harm and not just fear monger.
There's been PLENTY of public evidence presented.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-just-rug-pulled-the-china-hawks?r=e9tr3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
On the other hand they were right that Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Let’s not cherry pick.
Buying an American TV station is foreign investment in a domestic asset, specifically a domestic asset that has exclusive control of a physically limited asset that government policy has regarded as requiring maximum utility for the public benefit.
Online services aren't constrained by location or spectrum policy, which gets back to just being plain censorship.
Online services are constrained by where their ownership is located and where the engineers who run the services are located.
I don't agree.
The location of ownership does not impact the reach of the service. The location of the engineers does not impact the reach of a service.
There are equipment manufacturers who operate exclusively in China and whose products I might purchase. They have support websites. They have no US entity or engineers. I can access their support websites just fine.
Can you find any example of a website available in any two other jurisdictions on the planet, such website wanting to be broadly available, which is not available in the US? I suspect not. The US has literally never done national level blocking in the network layers to prevent access to foreign services on the internet.
>>The location of ownership does not impact the reach of the service. The location of the engineers does not impact the reach of a service.
That's irrelevant.
The location of the ownership and the engineers impacts which country's POLICE get to arrest them for operating the service in ways counter to the country's interest.
America's adversaries are using its weaknesses against it. The survival of the American system is at stake in the upcoming election, in no small part thanks to this. It's sad that (some) Americans are so determined to ignore this uncomfortable reality that they're willing to argue America should treat close allies the same as it does its leading adversaries.
In my mind, if we are an America fearful enough to start making laws motivated by the desire to control information content from our rivals in media, then the American system has already failed.
The US has every right to try to control US domestic activities by foreign rivals.
Allowing anyone, including our rivals, to inject political speech into our infosphere is a good principle actually and asserting a right to control it destroys the American system you are seeking to protect.
I think it’s useful to distinguish when a government wants to control information content and when a government wants to prevent a hostile nation for controlling information content.
A hostile X is controlling information content somewhere in the US. I'm quite sure the first amendment protects this arrangement whatever X is - citizen, corporation, organization, foreign national, foreign organization, or foreign nation as long as it doesn't fall afoul of the narrow exceptions that exist.
"Our rivals in media."
If Britain was a hostile foreign government, then the US should go after them.
The idea that the problem here is the "foreign" rather than the "hostile" seems so obvious that I don't see how you miss it.
When did we officially declare China 'hostile'? What was the legal process for that? Because we literally have the world's largest trading relationship with them, so it seems a little odd.
Russia is hostile- can we ban Russia Today? Russian TV channels in general? Pravda? Nabokov? The Nutcracker? Is there a limiting principle here anywhere?
China is one of six designated foreign adversaries of the United States for purposes of regulating economic ties:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subpart-A/section-7.4
I believe the Executive Branch can amend this list as it sees fit, but I'm not sure.
??? Syria isn't hostile *to the United States*. It's hostile to Syria.
I think the bidirectional and bespoke engagement of utilizing apps is different in important ways from "broadcasting" or broadly popular art/lit.
Seems the greatest harm from these apps is just their normal functioning, rather than who’s tweaking the algorithm.
That maybe true, though I’d rather indifferent greed direct the algorithm than intentional hostility.
I think the argument is that "if Biden can do this with TikTok, then Trump can do this with BBC America [probably because Keir Starmer said something mean about him]"
I'd say even if this would happen, it would be an acceptable (albeit grotesque) tradeoff because PRC-controlled TikTok is a far greater threat to the US than BBC America is a positive contribution.
Yeah, I can see that argument, but that's a "we need to express the distinction that I already feel between the two cases in a legally-robust way" type argument, rather than a "the only distinction here is between the two political sides" type argument.
There might well be an argument along the lines of this, though: ByteDance owning TikTok and being influenced by the CCP is difficult to distinguish in law from other foreign ownership of media and I'd prefer to keep Spotify up even at the expense of putting up with Chinese ownership of TikTok than to bring both down. A law that specifically names TikTok / ByteDance will fall under the constitutional prohibition on Bills of Attainder.
I don't think that's right; I think legislation can be drafted that specifies the cases where a ban on foreign ownership is necessary and those where it isn't, but I think that's a legitimate case to make.
Only Corbynites are hostile to America.
Do you see any differences between the UK and the CCP? Any differences with the type of relationship US has with either country? Including subpoena power and whistleblower protections? Do you remember, even with those relationships, how difficult it was to get to the bottom of the Cambridge Analytica issue?
I obviously see a difference which is why I raised them as a counterpoint. I do worry about the CCP controlling TikTok.
But it makes me nervous to give the government that kind of discretionary power.
I mean the reason I believe the ACLU did the right thing in defending the Skokie Nazis isn't because I don't disapprove of Nazis but because I worry about how that power might be used in other cases.
As I said, there are tough concerns on both sides here but the OP tried to suggest it was crazy not to support this and I think it's alot more complex than that.
It's really not that tough to ask Tiktok to demonstrate their connections with the CCP, and what involvement they have in editorial power, and then when they refuse to comply or are outright dishonest, say "sorry, you're being evasive, and can't do business here."
That's not the point. The point is that power could be used used elsewhere once it exists. I'm not doubtful of the threat from the CCP, I'm doubtful of the bright line rule which prevents this from being used to pressure the many foreign media orgs (BBC Al-jazerra) that also have foreign government influence to give the kind of coverage the party in power wants.
I mean it's even more apparent that Qatar influences the content of al-jazerra even if on most issues it does good journalism. Hence a complicated issue.
Are you literally just making a slippery slope argument and clutching your pearls about the path to serfdom?
(If you're so concerned about power existing and being misused, it doesn't seem coherent to just be fine ceding power away to other governments by preferring inaction.)
The bright line is that the bill applies to TikTok (and any successor applications) and nothing else.
For the record, I agree that it's complex, and I agree with your concerns, I just come down on the other side.
But those concerns are precisely why I come down on this as a limited enterprise. As Charles mentioned above, China actually IS designated as a "foreign adversary". I think we delegate plenty of MUCH scarier powers with MUCH steeper slippery-slopes to our government. I'm OK with this one, especially given the bipartisan agreement.
I think it's MUCH scarier that the CCP (through TikTok) was able to alarm so many users with that push notification on such short notice. They *flooded* Congressional offices, and they weren't even trying that hard.
As Agent K said, "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." I rate the TikTok threat as closer to "shouting fire" than mere unpopular speech that needs to be defended.
The BBC is a *public* broadcaster not a *state* broadcaster.
Public is the nice way we say state when we like them. Ultimately they are funded by and are responsible to the government of the UK.
Which is FAR more responsible to its people than the CCP to theirs.
I trust democracies.
What I don't trust is our government to never apply this kind of power against sources like the BBC or other reputable news orgs that have foreign control.
The form of the argument is: yes CCP control over TikTok is bad but if you let the government have discretionary power here they might use it in cases where it's not so good.
But the thing is, no one *IS* giving the government "discretionary power".
It's *one* bill narrowly targeted at *one* company, a bill which is only viable because of the sheer bipartisan majority behind it.
Any similar campaign directed against, say, the BBC, would immediately run into partisan obstruction -- IE the Democrats would filibuster it into oblivion if it even made it out of committee. Ditto, sad to say, if Dems tried to ban RT with a narrow ban of their own.
The only thing that's making this remotely viable is the exceedingly rare bipartisan majority. To me, that doesn't scream "abuse of power" or even "discretionary power", it screams "just this once, and for a DAMNED good reason", the same way we treat our sanctions on, say, Putin's oligarchs. It's not like we've gone and sanctioned half of London in the past decade of Putin's oligarchs using it as their personal playground.
Except when they elect narcissistic demagogues?
They're not *perfect*. They're just better than tyrannies.
What's the distinction you're making here?
The BBC isn't a mouthpiece for Rishi Sunak or whomever is in charge of Parliament. They're an incredibly reputable news source that doesn't hesitate to criticize their government.
Right...so it would be bad to do the same to the BBC. Glad we agree. But the lack of a bright line rule here bothers me. Seems like there is always the risk that if you do this for TikTok and the BBC start saying things that outrage the wrong people you could bring the same kind of threat to bear.
And al-jazerra is exactly the kind of case that makes it even more difficult. Qatar very obviously has some control over what it says but it's mostly free to do good journalism.
I don't want it to be the case that al-jazerra feels that it's more likely to face a similar punishment if it has negative coverage of the party in power and without a bright line rule that seems like a potential danger.
Point is that it's far from simple.