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.
That just seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Tik-Tok is a very new, short form video app, that doesn't function at all like a credible news org like BBC or al-jazeera. If the US or the UK is threatening to ban one of those news outlets, that probably means CNN, NPR, etc. are also under threat. And if that's the case, we're probably in a full blow democratic crisis that is not at all related to the decision to force bytedance to sell tik-tok.
It is the same one that came up when Musk stamped the label of “government-funded media” on the Twitter posts of the CBC, insinuating that the Canadian government had editorial control over its stories when in fact the CBC’s editorial independence is enshrined in law. The same goes for the BBC https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines/editorial-standards
You can see the difference I’m sure with Chinese state media where the government has its hands right on the keyboard.
That's literally why they are a good example of a foreign government controlled media entity that it would be bad if say a Trump government could pressure using the same excuse.
If I thought it was also good for the US government to be able to ban the BBC in the US it wouldn't really be a helpful argument would it?
I'd like to add to this that I could absolutely stream RT News in my home today. We've been supporting, nationally, a country involved in a war with Russia, and yet I can still access Russian state propaganda if I want to.
You're confusing the right of an american to publish CCP propaganda with the right of the CCP itself to publish that propaganda in america, and also misinterpreting the word 'propaganda' for Uncle Sam Wants You style posters, and not an interactive and personal data-driven AI algorithm. Seems a pretty cut and dry time/place/manner restriction.
"Hostile nations cannot operate unverified and unsupervised algorithms and data collection on networked devices of United States citizens" seems like it should be uncontroversial, and says nothing about speech.
No, Matt's CBS analogy is very bad, no good, and as much hot trash as when he used a variant of it last time he wrote about TikTok. The legal theory behind why the USSR could be blocked from owning an American broadcaster in 1975 is "public ownership of the airwaves" and is the exact same reason the FCC could constitutionally regulate American ownership of broadcasters as well as the content of broadcast media (e.g. Fairness Doctrine, children's programming requirements, etc.)
The situation here is much more akin to proposing putting up jammers to block shortwave radio transmissions from Radio Moscow from being received by Americans, something which the US very definitely DIDN'T do.
Matt wasn’t making using the analogy for legal precedence, he was saying (correctly, I think) the US government would’ve found a way to block the sale. Maybe they would’ve used a “public use of the airwaves” justification, and they can’t use that here, but the legal means of reaching the intended policy is besides the point of his argument.
Except the First Amendment necessarily makes the legal means of reaching the intended policy the central issue when the "intended policy" is government-enforced viewpoint discrimination in speech.
Is it viewpoint discrimination or foreign ownership discrimination? My understanding is that it was the recipient Lamont's rights that were in question. The court didn't confer, and declined to address. any rights the foreign government had to ship the material through to the US in the first place.
"We do not have here, any more than we had in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327 U. S. 146, any question concerning the extent to which Congress may classify the mail and fix the charges for its carriage. Nor do we reach the question whether the standard here applied could pass constitutional muster. Nor do we deal with the right of Customs to inspect material from abroad for contraband."
Controlling what a foreign government can do, either directly or indirectly though ownership of a US corporation operating in the US, is well within the purview of Congress. The constitutional review would at best be a rational basis test which would be easily passed: Congress could simply list all the bad things the CCP does. There's no requirement that it treat all foreign governments exactly the same, nor all foreign ownership, nor even all CCCP ownership.
The "foreign ownership discrimination" is literally only happening because of a highly explicit desire to commit viewpoint discrimination with regard to the media content consumed by Americans. (That's why Lamont is relevant.) Propose a neutral rule of general applicability that incidentally would result in the divestiture of Chinese ownership of TikTok and we can have an intelligible discussion on the subject.
I don't think it's unintelligible just because people aren't reaching the same conclusion.
But I'll take one last crack. The US government could without a doubt blanket ban any Chinese government ownership of US corporations. They could then carve out exceptions until there's almost nothing banned except TikTok. But I don't think they need to be that clever. They could ban ownership of any corporation that produces, owns, or markets software programs or applications. That covers tiktok, and maybe adds in they can't have interests in Amazon, IBM, Cisco, etc. Then, assuming a US citizen gets standing to challenge the law, what's the remedy that they could demand? Is the Court really able to issue an order compelling the US government to grant a foreign government an entitlement to property rights in the US, That would be a huge intrusion on the Legislative and Executive branches power to conduct foreign policy.
We today have seized hundreds of millions of assets of foreign governments for what we declared to be their bad actions. If those assets happened to be TikTok or some other media firm would that protect them from seizure?
“The Act sets administrative officials astride the flow of mail to inspect it, appraise it, write the addressee about it, and await a response before dispatching the mail.”
"No no it's not viewpoint discrimination, it's this totally different thing that we definitely have the power to do and it's just a coincidence that it's going to result in the viewpoint discrimination that everyone voting for it has made clear they desire."
You can't just sidestep the first amendment by being clever.
“Is it viewpoint discrimination or foreign ownership discrimination?”
It doesn’t matter. The question is whether the pending bill is acting as a legitimate means to (quoting from the Senate version), “protect the national security of the United States.”
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's because I think you're mistaking it AS a legal analogy. It's not. It's about norms and what we'd pragmatically tolerate.
As I also mentioned on that response, Potter Stewart wasn't arguing for having zero norms, he was arguing for being pragmatic. Were he still alive and serving, he'd probably take one look at TikTok and be like, "Yep, that's propaganda."
I mention the legal problems to illuminate the principles I think we should have in not letting governments being able to declare which platforms of expressive content we should restrict. You disagree with that, but I think that's a power that can go very wrong if established.
“…that's a power that can go very wrong if established
Yup: Like tariffs on commodities predicated on national security. That *can* be a legit exercise of government power, but also has been abused for political purposes.
Are you arguing that the legal basis is different or that the rationale for CBS is strong and for TikTok is weak?
If it’s the legal basis, that’s based on the law. Congress passes a new law and the legal basis changes. The idea that foreign ownership/control of media distribution is constitutionally protected unless distribution is doing through publicly-owned airways doesn’t make much sense. Could you elaborate?
If it’s that limiting ownership of firms that use common airways is justified on moral/ethical/public policy grounds but limiting ownership of other means of distribution isn’t, I still don’t see the case for that.
"Are you arguing that the legal basis is different or that the rationale for CBS is strong and for TikTok is weak?"
Both.
The rationale for 1975 CBS is strong because SCOTUS had ruled decades earlier (in an era when First Amendment protections were vastly lower, BTW; it's questionable whether the Court would rule the same way today) that because the electromagnetic spectrum for radio (and later television) broadcasts was limited, (1) it was a public resource that was owned by the U.S. government, and thus (2) the U.S. government (through the FCC) had broad powers to control who was authorized to operate radio and television stations, with those powers being so broad that (3) the federal government could even permissibly discriminate against potential owners based on their political views so long as the FCC was able to come up with a halfway non-laugh inducing "public interest" rationale for the discrimination. (This same rationale also allowed the FCC to manipulate content on broadcast media in numerous ways, BTW, most obviously the Fairness Doctrine, but also restrictions on non-obscene indecency, special hours for children's programming, educational content requirements, etc.)
There is no such SCOTUS ruling holding that the internet is owned by the federal government. Further, the rationales given by SCOTUS for why the broadcast spectrum should be treated as federal property obviously have no applicability to the internet and, in fact, SCOTUS itself has specifically ruled in the past that the rationales for allowing federal regulation of broadcast media do not have applicability to cable television. Media consumed via the internet is obviously far more analogous to cable television than it is to broadcast media.
In terms of the "legal basis," foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected. However, the right of Americans to consume the media of their choice IS constitutionally protected, and SCOTUS has expressly found that includes the right even to consume foreign communist propaganda (Lamont v. Postmaster General). Further, under a mountain of SCOTUS precedent, the federal government generally may not engage in "viewpoint discrimination," i.e., it cannot favor one position on a topic versus another. If there was a proposal for a neutral rule of general applicability that would require Chinese ownership of TikTok to be divested, that could probably be done constitutionally. But that's NOT the proposal. The proposal is literally, "Get TikTok because we don't like the viewpoints it promotes." That's not constitutional.
Wait, what? The proposal is: "force divestiture of TikTok because it is owned by a parent company that is responsible to a hostile foreign power." You yourself acknowledge that "foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected." That becomes the ballgame.
I think an interesting thing here is that some lawyers on this thread seem to be struggling under the weight of precedents that were conceived in a very different technological context. Is the idea that if the Soviets owned a cable channel spewing Soviet propaganda that Congress could not ban it, because as a cable channel it wasn't distributed via the public airways? I think Matt's analogy is correct-- judges would have allowed Congress to act. Stare decisis yields to practical necessity, as it should here.
"You yourself acknowledge that 'foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected.' That becomes the ballgame."
No, it's not the ballgame, because we're not talking about a proposal for a neutral rule of general applicability as I already explicitly pointed out in my final paragraph. The "rule" being proposed here is literally, "Let's get TikTok because we don't like the viewpoints it promotes."
To put it another way, there are all sorts of laws and regulations that on some level interfere with speech which are constitutionally permissible, but the question is to what extent they particularly interfere with speech (as compared to just incidentally interfere) and to what extent any such interference is motivated by trying to discriminate against particular speech. E.g., a 5% sales tax that applies to all retail sales, including books, magazines, and newspapers is constitutional even though on the margins it results in some suppression of free speech by making it more expensive to buy books, magazines, and newspapers. A 5% sales tax that applies ONLY to sales of books, magazines, and newspapers while other sorts of products that are not taxed, is more questionable and probably unconstitutional without some pretty clear showing of why it's needed. A 5% sales tax that applies ONLY to sales of books, magazines, and newspapers that espouse political views disapproved of by the U.S. government is blatantly unconstitutional.
"Is the idea that if the Soviets owned a cable channel spewing Soviet propaganda that Congress could not ban it, because as a cable channel it wasn't distributed via the public airways?"
Yes, that would almost certainly be correct under existing SCOTUS precedent -- if the Soviet Union could have convinced an American cable company to carry Soviet Central Television in the 1980s, then it would have been unconstitutional to pass a law banning it. You can say that SCOTUS should reach a *different* decision because [insert whatever reason you think is compelling], but it's intellectually dishonest to start from the point of saying, "Let's adopt [Policy X]," without also mentioning, "BTW, [Policy X] is almost certainly unconstitutional under existing precedent and we're going to have to litigate it all the way to SCOTUS to get a change in the law."
"if the Soviet Union could have convinced an American cable company to carry Soviet Central Television in the 1980s, then it would have been unconstitutional to pass a law banning it."
I'm somewhat surprised that this didn't happen, actually. Somebody at those firms must have decided that pay-per-view porn was OK, but whatever the Soviets were willing to pay to have their content distributed was not. Or maybe the Soviets just weren't sophisticated enough about American culture to try?
Well one obvious reason is that broadcasters broadcast all the time, and people may consume unintentionally, but you have to proactively choose to go to TikTok.
Is easy to see that the government doesn't posess this power for good reason. The CBS example is a poor one, that's about limited spectrum. This is closer to the government banning you from reading Pravda, which it can't.
The law is a tool. If it’s delivering bad outcomes new laws can be written. If the claim is CCP TikTok is constitutionally protected, it’s not obvious to me and I think Biden should have the fight.
Uh... no. Did you all read the article? The videos on TikTok can and do exist on every social network.=
This is closer to the government *closing a store that sold Pravda*, which it absolutely can do. They have to have a reason other than "you can't sell Pravda", but they absolutely can close such a store.
If you can't think of legitimate national security reasons *other than the nature of some of its content* to ban tiktok, you literally are not paying attention.
If the Soviet Union had bought Waldenbooks and turned it into Pravdabooks, could the government compel Pravdabooks to be sold to an American company, with no restrictions on what the new company would sell?
You definitely can't do it on the basis of the content of the books Pravdabooks is selling. Now if you're talking broader Iron Curtain style prohibitions on all economic activity you can maybe shut them down, but it's different reasoning that sweeps a lot broader than banning tiktok because of the propaganda content.
But could you do it on the basis on Pravdabooks being owned by the Soviet Union? Just as we are forcing the sale of TikTok, not because of its content, but because it's owned by a company in a hostile nation?
"Just as we are forcing the sale of TikTok, not because of its content, but because it's owned by a company in a hostile nation?"
The problem with that rationale is that several dozen members of Congress have already completely **** the bed by being explicit that their main animating concern is viewpoint discrimination. In the First Amendment context, the courts have generally been very willing to look at what politicians have indicated about their reasons for pursuing facially non-viewpoint discriminatory restrictions on speech when assessing the constitutionality of particular laws. SCOTUS struck down a Louisiana state 2% tax on gross receipts of newspapers with circulations of more than 20,000 copies per week in Grosjean v. American Press Co. because that threshold appeared to coincide with punishing a particular newspaper that had been critical of Huey Long.
It may be that in the progress of this particular debate, Congresspersons have exposed themselves to the charge that they're discriminating on viewpoint. That's pretty different from what I took you, Matt, and others opposing this bill to be saying, that forcing ByteDance to divest would be unconstitutional regardless of what Congresspersons said about why they were doing it.
You could make a case for Iron Curtain 2.0 where Apple and Tesla and Amazon aren't allowed to do business with the CCP anymore in which you also force ByteDance to sell tiktok. You cannot obscure attacking tiktok for its content by pretending Cold War 2 is on when it's not.
As sometimes happens when I converse with you, I'm not sure, when you say "you cannot," if you're saying this is illegal/prohibited, or if you're saying more like "you must not," like it would be wrong to do even if legal. I'm asking, in a limited way, if it is legal to force a foreign company's divestiture, or not.
Haidt takes MFT too far, that's my big knock on him. He reflexively analyzes every problem through that lens, same as Taibbi and Greenwald do with antiwar/anti-surveillance politics.
Andrew Sullivan is a true conservative and at times gets caught up in Culture Wars but his name belongs nowhere near Taibbi's and Greenwald's, who have completely lost their minds in recent years.
This is an interesting list for determining one’s thinking. Ben below objects to Haidt being in this “bad list”
I cannot listen to Greenwald at all. Taibbi is interesting and reasonable when he talks but gets out there for me in his writing. Haidt seems like a good social psychologist and I like Andrew Sullivan a great hero for gay people are even if he doesn’t get credit. He’s also very intellectually curious and interesting. I like his podcast.
Tyler Cowen an interesting guy and seems super knowledgeable on lots of things. I like his podcast.
Muccigrosso is a down-the-line standard-bearing party man Democrat, so I suspect his good list would mostly consist of writers who criticize the Dems less.
I think the PRC government has already signaled they won't allow a forced sale. Maybe that's a bluff. Maybe not. But I suspect some of the qualms people have about the proposal before Congress flow from the fact that, if China is serious about not playing ball, we'll soon see TikTok banned in the US. I don't use it myself, but I gather a lot of marketers, ad agencies, influencers and creatives use it. In other words, there's a difference between opposing the end of CCP control of a platform, and banning the platform.
It's evidence that they care about this as more than a mere issue of setting up a shell company for foreign ownership.
Notably, the CCP are also dealing with a round of nationalizations and defaults of failed BRI projects abroad. And while they're understandably opposing those nationalizations and defaults, they *aren't* sending alarming push notifications to those countries' populations casting the disputes as "theft" or "bans" on Chinese business activity.
Did you know that the CCP recently banned foreign companies from operating in their economy? They require them to set up domestically-held "foreign-funded enterprises" that enable domestic control (by the CCP). All WOFEs are being forced to become FFEs by next year.
[Ed: THAT tells me that they're extremely invested in making sure nobody BUT the CCP gets to say what any company that does any business anywhere in China does. It's not that I believe in "tit for tat" - I don't, except when I'm not at my best. It's not that I believe in applying draconian rules like their own to OUR shores -- I'm perfectly fine with the VAST MAJORITY of foreign companies, even ones I don't like, doing their business here with no interference. But the fact that they're doing it on their own shores, and the fact that they're disproportionately mobilizing their response to defend the one company that theoretically poses a propaganda risk to America (among other countries), tells me that their intentions are NOT peaceful. They may dislike the idea of war just as much as we dislike it ourselves, but no one here should be under any illusion that they aren't trying to edge us out with whatever "peaceful" advantage they can get, like a massive propaganda psy-op. As someone committed to the freedoms of liberal democracy, I refuse to accept our specific commitment to free speech as a suicide pact in the face of such a threat.]
Marketers and ad agencies will be totally fine switching to whatever the new platform is. Influencers and creatives won’t necessarily be happy with the shakeup caused by the move, but some will surely do well.
I tend to agree, Matt. But Trump’s point about giving even more power to folks like Zuckerberg, who interfered blatantly in the 2020 election, is a valid one. I can understand why leftists, whose cause was helped by the 2020 election interference, would see no problem, but frankly, I’m not sure who my bigger enemy is. Just to remind you: In 2020 folks were being banned/censored for posting the truth about covid origins, Hunter Biden’s laptop, BLM/Antifa crimes, mask effectiveness and other things.
The CBS analogy is perfect. By using 1975, it also shows how much the media environment has changed in the last 50 years after Watergate. The shackles are off. By hiding behind "Free Speech", we are at risk of handing over the keys (again) of our nuclear arsenal to someone completely willing to sell it to the highest bidder. The FCC, like all of our regulatory bodies, has not been able to keep up with technology or the changing times. They are always fighting yesterdays corruption and ill-prepared to handle today or tomorrow's new schemes.
"By hiding behind "Free Speech", we are at risk of handing over the keys (again) of our nuclear arsenal to someone completely willing to sell it to the highest bidder."
The fact that the CCP was able to mobilize tens of thousands of people to protest our government on a false pretense here should scare the fuck out of us.
My position is simple. I want a button that shuts down CCP bullshit like this. I want an American engineer’s finger on that button. I want their paycheck signed by an American executive. I want that executive’s shareholders to hold their stock on an American exchange - stock that is NOT revocable merely for criticizing the company.
There just isn't a good reason to allow kids to vote.
If their brains aren't developed enough to choose whether they get to drink, or smoke, or drive, or take out plans...they also aren't mature enough to vote.
He things civic participation is important and teaching it via voting in school would be valuable. I understand this idea. I also think teens are often silly.
Agreed. My daughter's schools have done that since elementary school. Among other benefits, the fact that only 2 of 538 students at her Elementary School voted for Trump in their mock election in 2016 really helped her feel a little bit more emotionally safe in the aftermath when I think she and a lot of other kids who watched the real results were wondering if what the adults in their lives said about honesty, trust, kindness, bullying, or hard work was all BS.
I think more civics classes that get kids to attend city council meetings and tour local government services like the water treatment plant (we did that, though it was right down the street) are things kids need.
I generally have been one of the more respectful voices about current teens in this space. I think they are better educated than they are being given credit for and their ideas have more merit than people who just view them as "woke" and are more self-directed about their gender choices that many folks believe.
I don't think we should reduce the voting age below 18. (If anything, we should think about increasing the driving age to 18. I would even be open to reducing the drinking age to 18 so that we don't have unenforced rules on the books.)
Voting is a significant right and responsibility that comes with being an adult citizen of this country. I think teens deserve the chance to mature get more informed about US history and civics before they are asked to participate in that process and I do worry that parents will potentially pressure teens to vote in line with their own voting wishes in distorted ways.
I would be interested in a non-binding advisory vote for kids 16 to 18 in elections to get them registered, allow them to learn the voting process, and practice before they get a real vote.
I am fairly certain that reducing the voting age to 16 or 14 would greatly help my candidates in almost any election in my state so this isn't about self-interest. It is more about giving kids the space to explore their political values and ideas before giving them this kind of weighty responsibility.
I've gotten to talk to my daughter's friends about some weighty issues over the last few years including the complex situation in Gaza. My experience has been that they often jump immediately to easy answers that are popular in their bubble of social media. But when given historical context and allowed to have a real conversation about the complexity of the situation and competing interests and needs they come to diverse, reasonable, and thoughtful places. I have a lot of faith in them as voters for 2026 when they will finally get to vote but I don't want to rush that.
This was such an unforced error by ByteDance and really seems to have solidified the bill passing. It is hard to fathom why they thought that demonstrating the very power people are concerned about would help them here. Goes to show these decisions are being made in Beijing because I can't imagine an American PR person would be this stupid
Maybe it's just a demonstration of power - show they own our kids, then show they own the next president, then sit back and watch while the dysfunctional government fails to do anything about it...
What happens when that button is pushed by future governments that shuts down foreign government information critical of the United States where you'd think the criticism is warranted?
We're talking about ONE button at ONE company directed at ONE adversary.
The BBC remains perfectly free to run critical content of the US in the US, just as our own media run critical content of the royals over there.
Hell, AL FREAKING JAZEERA remains perfectly free to run critical content of the US, and does it every day.
However, neither of them, nor their respective governments, is entitled to run a service that beams addictive short-form videos into our childrens' brains every day, operate censorious policies on said service, nor pose a risk of releasing propaganda-posing-as-content that is designed to adversarially undermine our geopolitical interests at key moments.
I'd pose the question back to you: How do YOU differentiate between propaganda and criticism? Because it doesn't seem like you have elucidated ANY kind of difference.
I'd say that a good place to start defining propaganda is "When the CCP blitzes dozens of videos to Americans' TikTok feeds that seek to justify to them -- through truth OR falsehood -- an invasion of Taiwan, such that it politically undermines any otherwise reasoned response to said invasion".
To be clear: I'm trying to separate the propaganda from the ultimate decision our leaders make. If a President Biden in 2026 decided in his heart of hearts not to defend Taiwan, then fine -- that's his decision, that's why we elect leaders like him, to make the big decisions.
What I *don't* want to see is a repeat of last Friday on steroids, where millions of now-voting-age Zoomers start flooding Congressional offices demanding that Congress stop President Biden before he engages in "imperialist aggression", all because the CCP released dozens of videos on TikTok making themselves out to be some poor victimized country that must defend themselves from imperialist Taiwanese aggression, in advance of the CCP themselves committing an aggressive imperialist invasion of Taiwan.
Basically, a replay of the cynical play we saw Russia run before invading Ukraine, except for 100x more effective because of TikTok's scale and the implicit trust that being addicted to it confers on unsuspecting Zoomers.
I don't think you can legally distinguish between criticism and propaganda without running into severe First Amendment problems. That's why I'm challenging this--it's the problem Potter Stewart ran into when he said "I know it when I see it.". Socially, we're all allowed to define the terms however we want, and be vocally critical of what we think is bad. I'd be fine with that, and I'd likely find many overlaps of agreement! It's good to counter speech we think is bad with our own speech.
Stewart was arguing in favor of pragmatism, not against having any standards at all.
Fundamentally, I think this is an issue not of speech, but of platforms. The same videos can be disseminated on many different platforms. Any individual video's speech is not being prohibited. Even during the Cold War, we didn't ban Pravda.
However, regardless of whether there was ever an explicit ban, there certainly was an implicit societal norm against anyone ever contemplating letting Pravda own PBS, CBS, or any other media outlet beyond operating its own niche press operations. Matt's example isn't about the specifics or legalities, it's about this *norm*.
TikTok undermines that norm, because it's already INSIDE millions of Americans' media diets, distributing mostly perfectly unobjectionable speech. Pravda never managed that feat, let alone any other Soviet institution.
The point is, the platform's ownership and operation matters, irrespective of how permissible its content is. We never would have allowed the Soviets to sell us millions of kids' radios that could be tuned, from Russia, onto a Pravda broadcast at a moment's notice. We simply never would have allowed it.
You keep acting like this is about some specific item of content. It isn't. It's about the platform. The platform itself is the threat, and it's well within our laws to limit that threat while maintaining freedom of speech ON the platform.
After all, what do you think is going to happen if/when this sale gets forced? The American subsidiary's daily operations would barely change. It would operate the same way that hundreds of other subsidiaries already do within America. The only difference is that when the order came from the CCP to distribute "The Taiwan Videos" -- videos that will doubtlessly be played on many other platforms -- the US government can say "yeah, we're not going to let that get beamed directly to millions of our children without any context". Many children will still see the videos, just like many of them still see ISIS beheadings and Russia Today videos. We just won't have millions of them getting lied to and having that lie psychologically anchored into our electorate for the next 80 years.
But China being deterred from invading Taiwan is not contingent on viral 7 second video clips for Zoomers. It's the lack of greater naval defense spending because people in Congress have competing priorities for future spending.
This is also about where I am. Social media is fundamentally different from most of the other fact patterns we've seen brought up in a way that makes me OK with treating it differently.
Government-operated website/cable media like BBC, Al Jazeera, and Russia Today have limited ability to choose who sees what and very little ability to learn about individual Americans. Further, these media outlets also have vast competition, mostly adult audiences, and provide little to no interaction between users.
Broadcast propaganda like shortwave Voice of Moscow has no ability to choose who hears what, cannot learn about individual Americans, and provides no interaction between users.
Lamont v. Postmaster General dealt with a situation in which a small amount of communist publication was moving via USPS to individual Americans (who, as far as I can tell, were already interested in communism).
In contrast, successful social media platforms allow targeting information at the individual level, are popular with children, have a very wide reach, allow the operator to learn about individual Americans, feature significant interaction between users, reach users who aren't specifically interested in news from a particular country or with a particular political view, and have limited competition due to the nature of user-based content.
They're censoring content on it. And now just last week they proved-the-concept that they can tell a wholesale lie to our kids and get them to call Congress over it.
Censoring content on their own platform...which is something every platform has the power to do. And what's the latest wholesale lie you're referring to here?
Moderation is not censorship. Every platform moderates. Most don't censor, or at most, they censor to "community standards" like "no nudity" that match widely-accepted public indecency laws.
The lie is that they characterized the current bill as a "ban" when in fact it merely would force a sale. They sent it as a push notification to all of their users, and it was designed to create a user panic. Notably, many of those users did NOT exercise proper information hygiene and check the claims against multiple sources; instead, they panicked and started calling Congress. That's *A Problem* regardless of whether you or I can snootily sit here whining about how they should have exercised proper information hygiene.
It’s much more typical of Chinese media/influence strategy than American. There’s a reason that Zuckerberg didn’t send a push to everyone telling them to call up Ted Cruz in advance of those social media hearings a few weeks ago.
Agree. And much of Matt’s take on trumps lack of principle toward China actually also applies to Elon musk’s various positions according to his X account. What could have been viewed as a somewhat principled free speech stance around the time he took over the platform has morphed into an account that just constantly promotes right wing propaganda. I assume it’s out of self interest it’s just too transparently political. Obviously Matt’s already written about that but reading this article has helped my brain recalibrate musk as relatively trumpy.
Also, I want the Justice Department/FTC/FCC agreement governing the deal to entitle that engineer to whistleblower/“good faith” protections against getting fired over any decisions where they feel US citizens are being manipulated or at risk thereof.
That less than 1% excludes Hong Kong rather arbitrarily given its political situation so the real number is closer to 1.2% when you add in those $3 million excluded speakers. But the numbers are still low.
Chinese is also the second most difficult language for English Speakers to learn (Korean is the hardest) and English is the hardest language for Chinese speakers to learn. Chinese does not have verb tenses. It does not have gendered nouns or pronouns. It is tonal so that each letter sound has four distinct meanings but has fewer distinguishable letter sounds. Its writing is pictographic rather than phonic. There is no a word for "some" every noun has its own grouping word sort of like "bushel" that is used when making something plural. There is not system of otherwise indicating plural. There is no word for yes. There is no word for no.
China also allows very little international immigration and so has view people born abroad in English speaking countries outside of Hong Kong or children of native English speakers who speak English at home.
The fact that 13 million people in China speak English probably is good evidence of our cultural strength given its difficulty.
But yeah, the idea that we can barely speak Spanish is a bit off. I think Spanish speaking rates vary across the country quite a bit so there may be places where that is true but definitely not the West Coast. My daughter is learning Spanish in high school because it will be necessary for her if she wants to be a nurse in our area given the high rates of Spanish first language speakers here. Plus her own school has such high rates of Spanish as a first language that she would miss out on 1/3 of her ease-droping opportunities if she couldn't speak it.
The problem is the incentives faced by movie makers trying to earn profits in the Chinese market. I'm dubious about "soft power" generally, but if you want to preserve it while aligning Hollywood's incentives, just rule that Hollywood movies can't benefit from copyright protections overseas. Give the movies away, but don't sell them.
I wouldn't necessarily ban exporting the movies outright. But I would start providing more tools that allow us monetize movies while evading Chinese censorship.
Like, why the hell isn't Radio Free Asia running a massive bootleg DVD operation?
How would you define this distinction if Tiktok was an American company that just licenses the underlying tech and social network and content mainly from a foreign country, in ways that makes editorial decisions completely opaque?
Could still quite easily have a CCP agent in there, doing exactly what Matt is saying.
"How would you define this distinction if Tiktok was an American company that just licenses the underlying tech and social network and content mainly from a foreign country, in ways that makes editorial decisions completely opaque?"
Also worth noting: The CCP bans our social media and internet companies — facebook/instagram/meta, google, twitter/x, reddit and even pinterest. Besides the reason Matt outlines, you can think of banning TikTok as a similar to a retaliatory tariff. Something we have no problem doing.
As Matt says, Americans can always post on other apps and maintain all their rights.
A foreign business, employing agents of a adversarial foreign government, who won't explain how and why they make decisions, and have already shown they're lying about protections, maintaining the license to do business in the US, is not a matter of free speech.
It doesn't have to. We can use our speech to make the case that people should not be engaging in their speech and indulging the speech of others in this manner. I'd likely do so for TikTok--I can't stand it!
The mechanism is that the apps would not get updates via main marketplaces. No new downloads or updates. Eventually existing installations would become incompatible with updates to OS software or phone upgrades.
This piece features some of Matt’s most effective anti-Trump rhetoric to date. “Trump will sell you out” is provably true *and* could work with jaded moderates who don’t think “our norms” are worth defending. In fact, talking about our norms can comes off as something between officious and priggish— I long thought pre-Trump politics took decorum too far.
Absolutely. The defining principle of Trump is that he, in fact, has no actual principles aside from naked self-interest. He will sell out his allies on every single issue under the sun if he thinks it will benefit him in some way personally. The four years of the Trump presidency were a ritual of watching Republicans push some issue or law because Trump had weakly supported it only for him to saw off the branch as soon as they stepped on it because public sentiment turned against it.
We're now seeing this unfold right before our eyes with regards to this very issue. Republicans and their sycophants are twisting and turning to find ways to argue banning Tik Tok is actually censorious - just because Trump is now Pro Tik-Tok.
I tell people that they can vote for him if they think the interests of his particular financial beneficiaries aligns with their own ideological interests. What you CAN'T do is vote for Trump hoping your ideological interests align with his because those barely exist. Seems like a big gamble if you don't have the financial means to pay him yourself.
But people still like trying to anticipate the moves of crypto whales and outright gamble so maybe it's not that persuasive an argument.
I know this is beside the point and pretty old discourse, but both the hypocrisy from Republicans (whatever scummy stuff Hunter does, it pales in comparison to this) and the inability of any legal institutions to stop this is so enraging.
I appreciate the concern over Chinese control over TikTok and I'm not totally sure what I think about it. However, I think it's hard to be concerned about this and (coherently) not take worries about political bias of major social media companies more seriously than the left generally does. If the line that we don't know how much bias is present in the algorithm works for TikTok than it works for Facebook and Twitter too no?
Yes, as a big supporter of the first amendment I appreciate that the feds can't just go in and demand these companies change their messaging. But the left could at least publicly say it's bad and problematic when social media favors or disfavors political views that aren't (despite the fact you and I might wish they were) outside the Overton window of American political life. And the feds could investigate bills that reduce the power of network effects to create natural monopolies (eg various kinds of interoperability rules).
I certainly don't like the situation re CCP and TikTok but it also makes me uncomfortable for the government to move against a platform because of the viewpoint it might express so I don't really know what to think. However, it certainly feels to me there is a certain lack of consistency here -- or at least appreciation that people could have justified concerns here.
Remember the (likely to be successful) argument against the constitutionality of the TX and FL social media bills was exactly that choices made about what to favor or suppress are speech by the company.
Agree with this. I'm open to arguments about requiring transparency in algorithms and restrictions on politically motivated content moderation, etc etc. even though the Florida and Texas laws seem extremely poorly drafted and misguided in ways.
This "ban propaganda" argument is far weaker. Like, maybe the FCC would get away with keeping the Soviets off broadcast tv with a limited spectrum argument, but this is more akin to saying the government can ban you from reading Pravda, or more contemporaneously , streaming al-jazeera or RT or reading Glenn Greenwald's substack.
Honestly I've just talked myself into concluding it's a truly sinister idea.
Agreed. Also, whatever happened to the Oracle element? Supposedly this US tech giant was tapped to physically house the data of US TikTok users. Maybe it was all bullshit and/or this is technically infeasible. Maybe! It's definitely above my paygrade in terms of tech knowledge. But I'd like to hear a bit more about it either way. It seems to me this solution plus a "kill switch" that can be used if we actually go to war with China might be a less draconian solution than yanking the rug out from under the feet of TikTok's millions of American users, many of whom use the platform to earn a living. I'm reluctant to see our country retreat from the openness that has long characterized its tech and media spheres, and I'm worried we'll be a party of one on this among rich nations. Are France and Britain and Australia and Japan going to join us? I'd honestly feel better if they were. But I doubt they will.
For the record I accept the evidence that the Communist Party leverages its control of the platform for PR purposes, but their efforts seem to be pretty ineffective. China's about as popular in the US as a case of shingles, and Beijing doesn't seem to be winning the media wars when it comes to such topics as Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The narratives around such stories appear to be highly damaging to China's image both in the US and in other countries.
Edit: Meant to add: the above was written in reflection of my belief that what's before Congress will ultimately cause TikTok to be banned in the United States. A mere forced sale is less objectionable, but also, I think, a pipe dream.
To give the other side of the argument and why I'm unsure about it is that what if the CCP just starts offering cheap financing (effectively paying them) to social media companies that bury all posts critical of them? So it's not just one outlet but all outlets?
That's why I think it's a tough issue. Or at least one I feel I need to think about more.
I think there's a solid argument that, when a social media company purports to serve you a feed of user generated content based on your interests there should by a high bar against things that are not that. Any time an algorithm is promoting or hiding content based on inputs that are not coming from me, the user, I at the very least have a right to know, in detail, what outside choices are influencing my feed, and maybe even it rightly opens the company up to liability for those decisions.
Having previously worked at google trying to target ads I can tell you that's a lot harder distinction to make than you might realized.
For instance, when targeting ads google had to make calls like we aren't going to target ads (or even save data on) based on your visits to websites in sensitive areas like healthcare, porn etc. Sure, that would sell more products but it would creep people out and make them less trusting of the platform with their data.
Now that's about ads but social networks have to make similar choices. Is it ok to say, hmm people seem to find it more creepy if their feed is suddenly all Nazi content because they were curious about some pro-nazi account in the news and clicked like on a reply to the account (say the algo doesn't do sentiment analysis on pos vs neg replies)?
What if the app just wants to be fun and frivolous? Can it deprioritize political stuff generally? Is it enough if they tell you that they try to serve fun uplifting content everyone enjoys?
I mean ultimately I agree with you in principle but I just don't see how you can meaningfully operationalize this against an actor you don't really trust or has very different values.
I think the important regulatory distinction that doesn't really exist is between user-curated products and editorial ones. Or even components within a product, Spotify lets your search for stuff and make your own playlist, but you can also ask it to DJ for you. It offers both things, the problem is where these companies offer a user curated feed and then put their thumb on the scales in opaque ways. Maybe the answer is that, if companies want to be covered by something like section 230, they are required to self-select features into the "user curated" category at which point they're required to give the user what they ask for in a universal way, the bad stuff with the good.
Given a rich repository of user generated content upon which to draw from, any decision which intentionally causes the next video to be next is ultimately an editorial decision.
There's no such thing as purely what the "user" asks for. There's the concept of categorizing the content in the first place, and that's virtually always ambiguous and up for debate. There's also a spectrum of ok - these are all in category A, which you say you want to see. What deterministic mechanism will we use to determine which priority and ordering to feed those to you.
The algorithm will always have an aspect of optimization to keep you engaged and wanting more, that's the self-interest of the platform. The only difference is how well they hide/disguise it, and how much puffery they write to plausibly provide an alternate explanation that fits the fact pattern afterward.
Ultimately, that should just be left up to users. If they think that algorithmically curated lists are bad, they can put in the work to build their own. That's what I always do.
After some thought I think that maybe a transparency requirement plus a requirement that the team implementing this algorithm be us persons based in the us might be sufficient.
It's early, it took me a minute to sort my way through to this being one of the truly bad arguments against social media. As usual it's the government's fault... Stupid DST.
I hear you. I actually didn't think I'd wake up early for this one, but I was exhausted from a really busy day yesterday that I knew was coming, and called it a night quite early.
There's the "ban propaganda" argument as well as the "it's an opaque algorithm" with "employees overseas who will never go on record" argument.
If Glenn Greenwald or Rupert Murdoch were really mainlining Putin's speeches, it's at least clear they're doing uniformly, and could be subpoenaed if they somehow did a Camrbidge Analytica, or tracked some rival journalists phone for publishing an expose, as ByteDance has the power to do.
I'm absolutely open to the "opaque algorithms subject to undisclosed manipulation" arguments, but those apply every bit as much to Google/Facebook/Twitter as tiktok.
Okay, and now there was that bit about "employees overseas who will never go on record" especially one's who are subject to CCP threats and without the protections of American law. Or even their leadership. Remember Jack Ma?
Why are you only slowly capable of addressing each point, or even all the points together in concert?
At this point aren't we just talking about full blown Iron Curtain 2.0? Prohibiting anyone we deem to be subject to the malign influence of the CCP from engaging in economic activity in the US? I mean, maybe we are, but we're talking about essentially dropping a gigantic bomb on the global economy, and I'm not even confident Iron Curtain 2.0 extends all that effectively to information on the Internet.
I already addressed this type of argument with the comments about Gleenwald and Murdoch.
Again, why are you not capable of addressing the points in concert?
But it is truly amazing you think divesting Tiktok to an American company would be "dropping a gigantic bomb on the global economy." That type of argument as absurdum really shows how serious you're taking the topic and well how you understand Matt's article.
I wonder if companies shouldn’t be made to reveal algorithms, the same way we ask Betty Crocker (or whoever) to give us the nutritional content of the cake mix. Half formed thought based on my desire not to restrict speech, combined with my belief that some of these algorithms turn out to be very harmful.
I wonder how much good that would do, though. Algorithms are a lot more complicated than the number of calories in a serving of cake mix--I wonder if there would be a way to ELI5 what's going on effectively.
To me transparency about algorithm is the real issue and I don't think it is limited to TikTok although there is probably reason to believe that PRC would be more likely to sucessfully pressure a company to use it for state purposes. I feel like one of the big differences between social media and other media is that social media makes it seem like anyone can post content and what you are getting might be moderated but is basically reflective of what your friends, family, and people you have chosen to follow have posted when there is this invisible algorithm curating the work. If I read the Stranger, the local weekly that started out as a movie times, personal ads and sex advice and is now the second most read news publication in Seattle and considered by many to be their most trusted source of news, I am clear that this paper has an editorial staff who hire reports who find or are assigned news stories and features that are then edited and the editorial staff also drafts editorials as well. If i get a copy of the Stranger, it is just like the one my neighbor got. I know it's political bent. The Seattle Times is similar with a different bent and I can see both bents in part because of the editorials that they publish. The paper has ads which I know are ads and that are trying to sell me something. They both try to fact check and if they get something wrong they could be sued so that are motivated to be careful. But with Facebook, the content for each user is different and it is being delivered to you without transparency about why you are seeing what you are seeing or what its source is. The line between natural and sponsored content is murky and the platforms seem to favor extremism and polarizing content and there is really no fact checking.
I appreciate the sentiment but I think it's a lot harder to regulate transparency here than one might think.
The problem is that these are complex systems and there are all sorts of seemingly innocuous choices in designing and training the system that can be tweaked to have the desired effect.
I think you need a combination of some kind of transparency report plus a requirement that the team designing this part of the algorithm be us based and consist of us persons.
I think that the thing I find most pernicious about TikTok as a propaganda organ is the fact that a: it isn’t obviously labeled as such and b: it promotes views by subtly increasing or decreasing how much exposure particular content gets rather than articulating a view.
I’m not worried about “Americans reading Pravda” type cases because Pravda was obviously Soviet government propaganda and most Americans were able to use that information to make judgments about the source. There just isn’t that sort of informed consent with TikTok.
I think I’d be okay with a remedy that forced TikTok to be much more transparent about how its content promotion algorithms worked, and allowed external observers to monitor it. I would also be okay with similar principles being applied to US adtech companies.
Yes, I wouldn't be thrilled with it, but a Proposition 65 style notice (e.g., "ATTENTION: This application is known to the U.S. government to use algorithmic methods to select the content displayed to you and may not represent a random sample of content available on the application.") would probably be constitutional, but it would have to be applied to all websites using algorithmic methods to select the content that is displayed to users. (Which would effectively be every commercial media website and probably many or most non-commercial ones too.)
That seems feasible, frankly. (Not to say it's necessarily going to be effective.) There are only so many mediums via which online content can be viewed, and it wouldn't be too hard for a given browser or App Store to implement these warnings.
Compiling official lists of "propagandistic" platforms sounds like an unfun, contentious undertaking. But ultimately it could be a list of domain names and like, EINs.
Right, there is a massive difference between someone knowing reading and consuming a foreign government's propaganda and someone unknowingly consuming a foreign government's propaganda because it's nefariously integrated into a product via opaque algorithms.
Before I push back yet again on Matt's take here, I do want to make clear some agreements that I have that I should have before. And that starts with saying that I hate TikTok with the heat of a thousand suns and think it's bad. The stop and go video format, the gaudy subtitles filled with emojis, the lack of full video controls and, of course, evil autoplay, it's all bad and I hate it. I don't particularly buy an argument of addiction when it comes to any information dissemination, but I certainly have no problem saying we'd be better off without this format. And while I haven't seen enough evidence yet to definitively say that the CCP is using it to spy and shoot off propaganda, it seems plausible to me, and being owned by the CCP is certainly another demerit against a social media platform I already hate.
However...banning TikTok (and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick) is a major First Amendment breach, and it's really frustrating that Matt still hasn't engaged in this with his take. I'm sure srynerson will be here at some point to state once again the Supreme Court case that decided it, but people have the First Amendment right to read foreign propaganda from a hostile government. And defining what is propaganda and who is a hostile governmentis a subjective task, even if it's widely agreed by most that TikTok and the CCP qualifies. Stating otherwise gives future governments the ability to censor other foreign governments where the question of hostility and propaganda are much more questionable. And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies. There is no such scarcity with the internet, hence why the FCC has no such jurisdiction over it.
There's only one way to get rid of TikTok, and that's to beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America. I don't care how difficult it is with breaking network effects. We have multiple world class social media companies that are up for the task. Put together a federal initiative to get them to all unite and build one patriotic, American made platform if you have to.
“Hostile government” is a term that is already defined in law. I don’t think it’s any more subjective than “right to bear arms” or “freedom of religion”.
Only in the same sense that it’s subjective whether the top tax bracket pays 32% or 28%, and what income level the top tax bracket is calculated from. It gets specified by the law, and then it is objective what the law says.
Which makes it a relevant political question. I'm always open to the law and definitions of those countries change through the political process. But I think someone like Trump should have to make the argument that China is NOT a hostile government if he wants to make TikTok safe from this regulation. Mostly because I would enjoy his whole "Chyna" schtick in a speech that at the end had to declare why he thought we should remove them from the list of hostile governments.
However, after thinking about this for a little bit and reading the other comments I do think there is a better way.
First, I'd want to specifically target non-transparent moderation practices -- eg so a traditional news org where it's obviously selected by editors would be exempted.
But as I pointed out in a previous comment it's really hard to regulate this kind of content favoring syatem. So add a requirement that the group in charge of the algorithm for selecting content for display to Americans be based in the us employing us-persons who must issue some kind of transparency report indicating any kind of content they've choosen to delibrately disfavor.
I think the combination of the transparency report plus the requirement that it be done by us persons will handle both the concern that transparency could be evaded by a sufficently untrustworthy actor. And it's not a bad idea to apply it even to us companies and reduces the discretionary power of the state.
Right, but the usual idea is that the 1st amendment is supposed to take away legislative discretion regarding speech. And if this is valid it's not at all clear that they couldn't pass a law to do the same when the other government isn't hostile.
In particular, my concern is that in a growingly internationalized world pressure like this can be brought to bear selectively.
Let's consider Al-jazerra. Qatar is certainly in a kind of grey area where this kind of restriction could be justified on similar grounds but also could just not be applied and no one would bat an eye either. I'm quite concerned that this kind of precedent makes it relatively easier for Trump to pick up the phone and suggest to the people running al-jazerra america that he really doesn't appreciate the negative coverage -- and for that suggestion to suddenly have teeth behind it.
As is somewhat common for me in the SB comments, I find myself nodding along to both sides of the argument. To somewhat define the boundaries of your stance, do you think there's anything TikTok (or other platforms) could do that would make you agree with a forced sale/ban?
srynerson has laid out some ways in this thread in which a content neutral, viewpoint neutral law that happened to apply to TikTok, instead of targeting TikTok, could fly. I'd look at his posts for good descriptions on how that would work.
Many civil liberties are curtailed during war, justifiably so given the risks involved even if the results can be mixed. Just ask the Japanese-Americans who were interned in camps. Lincoln shut down Habeas during the Civil War.
Suppose that congress were first to declare war on China (which they have the power to do) but then do nothing besides force the sale of TikTok. Would that be constitutional? Acceptable?
What if congress were first to declare war on *TikTok*? The constitution does not specify that war can only be declared against a country. (Heck, our last war was against an abstract concept --- granted congress did not declare it.)
MOSTLY JOKE EDIT: what if congress used its powers to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land" to let Elon Musk capture TikTok's US business and servers?
I feel that forcing the sale of TikTok should either be justified by the circumstances or it shouldn't. Its constitutionality shouldn't hinge on whether or not congress recites a magic war incantation before passing the law.
I feel like there'.s a very bizarro world situation where we've dubbed China one of or permanent most favored nations to trade with, and one where we totally think extreme life or death wartime measures are needed.
Like the only people enduring any pain here are American TikTok users aside from maybe some already rich successful executives. Like Apple's still free to make its iPhones in China and have policies that no show can criticize them, but like I want to talk about Songwriters without getting death threats and harassment that I get on American social media and that's the thing we can't allow because maybe hypothetically they could use that in some way.
The relationship between China and the US (and the ‘west’ more generally) is indeed weird. From a national security front we treat them as an existential threat, yet there is also a massive amount of mutually beneficial trade between our economies. This is a totally different situation than was occurring during the Cold War with the Soviets.
I don’t think it’s all that bizarre. TikTok directly hits an intersection of issues that other companies do not: data privacy, social media + teens, national security, influencer culture, etc. There’s a lot of reasons people are skeptical of TikTok that end up bubbling up in this debate.
Most Chinese firms that do a lot of business with Americans aren't household names. Thus they're simply not very big targets. The several exceptions (TikTok, SHEIN, Temu) act as lightning rods.
No, we should have called it out as propaganda, and fought that speech with our own speech. And I have no problem with stridently calling out TikTok on those grounds if the evidence increasingly points to them being propagandistic (and perhaps spyish, as well).
Not exactly. It's being banned for being a tool of an authoritarian adversary. If people organically want to say things like Bin Laden was right (or whatever is currently being said on TikTok) on a western-owned platform, I'd be cool with it.
Again, defining an authoritarian adversary is subjective, even if there's wide agreement that the CCP should be defined as such. There will be cases where that definition is not as clear cut.
“beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America”
Unfortunately, “better” here really just means more addicting. I’m not a proponent of limiting free speech, but I also think it’s clear these apps are doing significant damage to the brains of the next generation. It would be good to stop China from putting its thumb on the scale to ensure their brains are rotted with pro-PRC and anti-American content. But I’m less sure that this is a problem for capitalism to solve.
I think is is very clear that TikTok is bad because of what it does to people’s brains, but it is especially bad because the owners want the negative effects and specifically to use the addictive properties to advance pro-PRC and anti-American propaganda.
"and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick"
Why? The government has the power to take ownership of private property (in this case, TikTok's US assets) via the Takings Clause (they would just have to compensate TikTok) and then turn around and sell the seized assets. (Arguably like Kelo v. City of New London.)
Technically, TikTok can do everything they do without holding any US assets. A foreign entity can directly publish an App in the US App Stores. Many do.
True, but that can be changed without a free speech issue. E.g. the EU requiring data on European users to be hosted in Europe isn’t a free speech issue.
> And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies.
I agree that's the principle used, but it's a fig leaf of an excuse. The sale of CBS wouldn't have been banned to prevent interference on people's antennas. There's certainly value in arguing forward from one's principles, wherever they lead. But arguing backwards from a desired outcome is also a time-honored tradition in American jurisprudence, and I don't see why it's beyond the pale here, especially when any benefit of not doing so is negligible.
Maybe I'm just becoming a pragmatist in my old age.
I think it's clear that my pragmatic read on this is different from several others here, which is that not allowing governments to shutter any publications they don't like ensures that they won't have that power to do it to publications less questionable than TikTok.
I think if TikTok were just a publication, most people wouldn't care. Maybe it's hyperbolic to claim that algorithmically delivered content in short video form is substantially more dangerous in its ability to shape people's minds, but I don't think it's completely crazy.
Regarding the risk of other outlets being banned someday, I don't think it's a real concern. I'm happy to take these one at a time.
"it's hyperbolic to claim that algorithmically delivered content in short video form is substantially more dangerous in its ability to shape people's minds, but I don't think it's completely crazy."
Except then you're effectively at Emma Goldman's, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal" dictum but for speech -- you have the right to read, listen, or watch whatever you want, just so long as it's ineffective at convincing you of anything we don't approve of.
Well, we don't let people living in foreign countries vote, nor do we let them buy ads for political candidates, so I think I'm still internally consistent.
The potential harm you’re discussing is moot. Instagram Reels exists. TikTok just has first-moved advantage. Were it banned, the exact same content would move to Reels, with more free speech because there would be no CCP censorship. QED.
I'm not sure that I would go for a total smartphone ban for under-18s, but I do think that a social media ban would be smart, and I think that smartphone/cell service providers should be required to offer phones and plans that can be locked into some kind of child mode that facilitates blocking of undesirable content and time-of-use restrictions.
There are some devices where the hardware itself is severely limited. I've seen some parents buy those for their kids, and I'm fine with parents making those decisions for their kids.
As someone who is on TikTok more then I would like and vicariously through my wife, the propaganda is very subtle but very effective.
The search about Uyghurs is a bit of a red herring, because no one uses TikTok's (terrible) search feature. TikTok's superpower is its algorithm, which is incredible. We joke that it is listening to our conversations, or maybe it's just untethered from some of the ethical restrictions that western companies put on the AI, but it is absolutely incredible at delivering exactly the content that you would enjoy. But it's not something that I may have expressed an interest in by likes, like mock-sad musical remixes about the anime Attack On Titan, but also on things that I never thought I would've liked but do (like videos of Maine fisherman cleaning barnacles off crabs).
All of that is to set up how good the algorithm is. And yet, both my wife and I were delivered many videos about the CEO of TikTok's testimony before congress, edited in ways to insinuate he was the victim of a McCarthyesque attack. There are other very subtle things the algorithm pushes on people, like Gen Zers talking about how Actually Osama Bin Laden Is Good. The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in.
This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in.
Except now you've basically reached Emma Goldman's, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal" dictum but for speech -- speech should only be free to the extent it's demonstrably ineffective at persuading people, but if it does actually influence people, we should lock that shit down tight!
I'll agree you didn't say that TikTok should be banned, but this statement is what I'm looking at:
"The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in. This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in."
That was a reference to someone in the comment who was speaking about a proverbial ban of Pravda - not that I was saying Pravda shouldn't be banned and TikTok should.
I don't actually know whether TikTok should be banned (or a sale forced) - but I think it's important for people to have a sense how TiKTok propaganda actually works (it's not that the search function is limiting Uyghur results).
1. I think allowing the US government to ban speech it calls 'propaganda' is an extremely bad precedent. Living in a free society with a 1st Amendment is a good thing, actually
2. The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it
3. The other reason the natsec infrastructure laws argument doesn't work is that TikTok is an offshore company- their servers are physically located on mainland China. Americans point their web browsers or phones towards it. I agree China shouldn't own critical industries that are physically located on the continental US, but if they build a media platform hosted in Beijing that happens to be popular with Americans, what are you going to do about that? Assert that the US can nationalize or block any media platform located anywhere on planet Earth, that enough Americans happen to go to? Or, block Americans at the ISP level from visiting it?
4. Yes you could get them out of the app store, but TikTok could build a web interface just like how Facebook and Instagram have one. Again- are you going to literally block Americans from going to a website?
5. Are we nationalizing or blocking, say, the Russia Today news channel? Way more overt propaganda than TikTok, and definitely held by a real foreign adversary. How about Iranian newspapers? Venezuelan newspapers? Where does the censorship stop, exactly?
1. Yes which is why it is important to beat China like a drum so their speech norms don’t become the global paradigm.
3. & 4. Yes you ban them from the App Store. How many people use Instagram through Safari on their phones, and how much do they use it compared to if they had the app?
re 1: "We have to suspend Americans' free speech rights, in order to beat the country that suppresses free speech rights". "We have to destroy the village in order to save it"
You could maybe ban them off the App Store (not sure if that's kosher or not), but what about all the people who already have the app installed on their phones? But to answer your question, yes, I think a ton of TikTok-addicted users would just visit their website
Long form video is more often consumed on computers or TVs than on phones. And of course YouTube became quite popular before the smartphone was invented.
There's no reason, constitutionally speaking, why Starlink couldn't be nationalized by an act of Congress. You just have to pay Elon Musk fair market value for it, which nobody wants to do.
I want to! From https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/02/27/singh-nationalize-starlink/: "Ketamine habit aside, Elon Musk has a massive conflict of interest and cannot be trusted to put the national interest over his own bottom line. Uncle Sam can and should resolve this conflict by buying Starlink, for a fair price." (Please ignore that I used "interest" twice in the same sentence, I am aware that it reads a bit less well than it would otherwise.)
I can not imagine why one would want to nationalize Starlink?
I'm familiar with multiple users of it who are quite happy with their commercial arrangement with Starlink.
Starlink has crossed many new lines success-wise as to bandwidth, capacity, low latency, etc. Those make it extremely capable and valuable, but a global satellite network for communication is not new territory. What is the rationale by which one would seek to nationalize Starlink, which is an inherently international service offering coincidentally.
Starlink is a new development. The US DoD has and has had their own satellite communications assets and networks for quite some time now. Nothing mission critical should be riding the Starlink constellation.
Starlink is also due to have competitors, though I have doubts about them, given their slow progress.
China has asked Starlink not to sell services in Chinese territory, which is their right - they have an uncontested right to grant or deny the terrestrial transmitter side. They would decline to grant regardless of who owns the network.
"The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it"
Why does this distinction matter? The soviet union should have been allowed to start their own US-based TV network but shouldn't have been allowed to buy one?
The USSR wouldn't have been allowed to start a broadcast network in 1975 for the same reason it couldn't buy CBS in 1975 -- FCC regulations that specifically applied to over-the-air broadcasting, but which have no applicability to the internet.
I unfortunately have too much work to do today to write a comprehensive response, but a lot of other folks are doing a good job on addressing key points, so I'll limit myself to a meta viewpoint on the whole thing:
This is truly a subject where Matt's general attitude of, "LOL, who cares what the courts have said, we'll figure out the specifics later," doesn't work because "The Law" and "The Policy" are completely inseparable in this context. It is not an exaggeration to say that the First Amendment is literally the most absolute part of American constitutional law. Unlike the Commerce Clause, which there are a million ways to engineer around, SCOTUS has spent the last century eradicating virtually every "One Weird Trick to Regulate Speech" that federal, state, and local government officials have devoted their efforts to coming up with outside of some very specific contexts (e.g., the broadcast regulations that make Matt's 1975 CBS example irrelevant) and SCOTUS has put a lot of effort in the last few decades to spelling out that those specific contexts are, indeed *specific*, and that it isn't looking to expand them.
You can say that those decisions by SCOTUS should be *overturned* (any level of government is free to try to do something unconstitutional and then convince the courts to overturn past precedents), but you should be honest about what you are advocating for.
I think that Matt—like a lot of fairly smart people— sometimes incorrectly makes the jump from the (correct) observation that law is basically Calvinball (rulers can in fact get away with making any decision that their subordinates are willing to enforce, and the Supreme Court can, in fact technically come to whatever conclusion it wants) to the conclusion that the courts, the civil service, or both will actually be willing to act like the law is Calvinball outside of some fairly particular and extreme circumstances.
There actually is some fairly strong consensus that courts should try to act in accordance with consistent principles and that officials should respect the courts’ conclusions. I admit that I was personally surprised by how strong the commitment is— I had to spend a couple years watching the (sometimes surprising and counterintuitive) effects of litigation on publicly traded companies and have some deep and serious conversations with lawyer friends before I really got it.
Taking this present reality one step further, I submit that we should all absolutely WANT the stability and consistency of principles in our courts' conclusions.
Yeah, I think that there are some cases where violating the norms out the window is the correct thing to do from a consequentialist perspective, but the cost is real, and high— it’s the sort of thing you should only do rarely, and when the stakes are really important.
As I've commented elsewhere here, people are free to propose things that violate present interpretations of the Constitution and to then try to convince SCOTUS to change its interpretation, but they should be honest that's what their proposal involves.
I hadn't heard of the idea of a progressive tax on digital ads as a way to incentivize social media diversification. I actually think that is a really good idea.
I don't think it works, in practice, unless you're using the revenue specifically to subsidize the creation, expansion, and perhaps even operating budgets of competing platforms.
In reality, the two biggest factors in an online advertising marketplace are total consumer reach -- how many people in the target audience are regularly interacting -- and technology/data support for matching advertiser/product/service interest with customer interest.
Even if the best marketplaces are the giants and are paying a larger tax, they'll take the cut to margin to keep the eyeballs and advertisers.
I think that is true if the tax rates are old mildly progressive but if there is a stark tax difference for a small revenue vs large, it might help some smaller regional services compete.
Guys, let me put it in terms you'll all understand: if you let them ban TikTok, next they'll require age verification on porn sites. Don't forget that MindGeek is a Canadian company!
Requiring age verification, which in practice means identity verification & recording because the site is going to want to be able to maintain an evidence file of best effort compliance for the inevitable bad faith attempts to undermine the verification scheme that comes after such schemes are enacted, inherently limits the reach and accessibility of material for and to marginalized communities. It has no place in a free speech society.
The protection of children is crucial and the way to protect one's children from bad things on the internet is to the use quite strong platform level protections in the device your child uses to restrict what they have access to and under what circumstances.
I would like to see more in depth reporting on the underlying legal questions and authorities surrounding the TikTok matter.
For instance, the rule against foreign broadcast network and broadcast station ownership is based upon two distinct factors to avoid 1st amendment bars - 1) broadcast television spectrum is inherently limited in capacity and must be utilized so as to maximize benefit of a scare resource for the general public. (This same theory is what underpins the no adult content, no vulgar language, etc. during kid friendly hours.) 2) these examples involve foreign investment into domestic companies and resources, which we can definitely restrict as a matter of commerce policy.
The TikTok issue is different. If it fully divested of US operations, it could remain a foreign entity entirely with its app still available in the US Apple & Google stores. I believe US citizens have a 1st amendment right to any published content they wish to access, including explicitly foreign propaganda. Is there actually a law that says I can't phone up a CCP office and ask to subscribe to their newsletter? Does the 1st amendment contemplate a mechanism for the US government to interfere should I do so?
When has a social media platform ever been sold and it worked out okay for the existing community. The only big examples I can think of were disastrous or tiny. I picture tt divestment going about as well as Tumblr’s adult content ban which it never was really the same fun place afterwards where you could have cool erotic art next to someone’s queer breakup story and a book review.
Are we just going to say like no fun things from China ever even though they seem to be where all the new entertainment will be coming from on a because we say so basis? Tencent owns a huge proportion of the other thing I’m likely to do if I’m not on TikTok which is play video games. Like what standards and are we forcing people to give up their work by and for? I’m really uncomfortable with your life as an American must get worse on an arbitrary we say so basis.
Was it the sale that caused this, or did the sale just trigger the inevitable switch from startup “burn-money-to-grow-at-all-costs” to needing to make the business financially beneficial
Maybe old YouTube would have developed the capacity to switch from good video host to algorithmically boosted shitshow without Google, but it surely would have taken a lot longer.
Main thing I remember being personally mad about is that it used to be, that if you had a crappy connection, you could just pause the video and let it buffer the whole thing so you could actually watch with decent quality. Big deal in the dark ages of 2008 or whenever that was.
I believe it was 2005 actually. I think it was already owned by Google when Lazy Sunday went viral. (Edit: apparently Lazy Sunday went viral in late 2005, but it was bought by Google in late 2006.)
I do remember that constant “buffering” thing. I don’t specifically remember the ability to buffer a whole video changing when ownership changed, but that does sound plausible.
So when China does bad things we should punish Americans with shitty trash like the reels community.
I also should add in as an edit here that most of these sales took place as a friendly effort between a small company and a big company to provide scale. This would be explicitly to change things about the product and give liscense to harm existing communities. I suspect it would look more like Tumblr than instagram.
I think there’s a level of truth to that but I also think there’s a bunch of problems that stem from Facebook’s choices. And the big one is unfixable that they associated most accounts back to Facebook and it’s highly tied with the friends and family network there, YT has the same problem but it’s business contacts. And even if they reversed course it’s water under the bridge at present.
I dispute that they’ve established a prima faciae case that this is for the greater good. You couldn’t win a high school debate with the proposition that Chinese control of TikTok has directly harmed Americans. There’s some evidence of propaganda but since when is arbitrary censorship of an online discussion harm?
The same institutions that have maliciously lied to Americans repeatedly for decades and never met a war they didn’t want.
China blocks its citizens' access to foreign media. Is that what we want to emulate? I should have the right to read, watch, listen to anything I want and judge for myself, even if it's state propaganda.
The "Soviets buying CBS" analogy doesn't hold - broadcasting never had full 1A protection due to the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum - a rationale that technology has made obsolete. (Confession: when I was a kid I sometimes listened to foreign broadcasts, including Radio Moscow - should the government have banned those inexpensive Radio Shack shortwave receivers?)
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.
That just seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Tik-Tok is a very new, short form video app, that doesn't function at all like a credible news org like BBC or al-jazeera. If the US or the UK is threatening to ban one of those news outlets, that probably means CNN, NPR, etc. are also under threat. And if that's the case, we're probably in a full blow democratic crisis that is not at all related to the decision to force bytedance to sell tik-tok.
It is the same one that came up when Musk stamped the label of “government-funded media” on the Twitter posts of the CBC, insinuating that the Canadian government had editorial control over its stories when in fact the CBC’s editorial independence is enshrined in law. The same goes for the BBC https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines/editorial-standards
You can see the difference I’m sure with Chinese state media where the government has its hands right on the keyboard.
That's literally why they are a good example of a foreign government controlled media entity that it would be bad if say a Trump government could pressure using the same excuse.
If I thought it was also good for the US government to be able to ban the BBC in the US it wouldn't really be a helpful argument would it?
I'd like to add to this that I could absolutely stream RT News in my home today. We've been supporting, nationally, a country involved in a war with Russia, and yet I can still access Russian state propaganda if I want to.
You're confusing the right of an american to publish CCP propaganda with the right of the CCP itself to publish that propaganda in america, and also misinterpreting the word 'propaganda' for Uncle Sam Wants You style posters, and not an interactive and personal data-driven AI algorithm. Seems a pretty cut and dry time/place/manner restriction.
"Hostile nations cannot operate unverified and unsupervised algorithms and data collection on networked devices of United States citizens" seems like it should be uncontroversial, and says nothing about speech.
No, Matt's CBS analogy is very bad, no good, and as much hot trash as when he used a variant of it last time he wrote about TikTok. The legal theory behind why the USSR could be blocked from owning an American broadcaster in 1975 is "public ownership of the airwaves" and is the exact same reason the FCC could constitutionally regulate American ownership of broadcasters as well as the content of broadcast media (e.g. Fairness Doctrine, children's programming requirements, etc.)
The situation here is much more akin to proposing putting up jammers to block shortwave radio transmissions from Radio Moscow from being received by Americans, something which the US very definitely DIDN'T do.
Matt wasn’t making using the analogy for legal precedence, he was saying (correctly, I think) the US government would’ve found a way to block the sale. Maybe they would’ve used a “public use of the airwaves” justification, and they can’t use that here, but the legal means of reaching the intended policy is besides the point of his argument.
Except the First Amendment necessarily makes the legal means of reaching the intended policy the central issue when the "intended policy" is government-enforced viewpoint discrimination in speech.
The bill says nothing about banning, there is no ban. It is about hostile foreign government ownership, the remedy is forced sale.
As City of Trees pointed out already, a ban is necessarily threatened in conjunction with a "forced sale."
I feel like I've made this comment about a dozen times in various parts of the comments section today.
The bill uses “prohibition.” That’s a ban.
But they have to threaten with a ban if they can't force a sale!
Is it viewpoint discrimination or foreign ownership discrimination? My understanding is that it was the recipient Lamont's rights that were in question. The court didn't confer, and declined to address. any rights the foreign government had to ship the material through to the US in the first place.
"We do not have here, any more than we had in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327 U. S. 146, any question concerning the extent to which Congress may classify the mail and fix the charges for its carriage. Nor do we reach the question whether the standard here applied could pass constitutional muster. Nor do we deal with the right of Customs to inspect material from abroad for contraband."
Controlling what a foreign government can do, either directly or indirectly though ownership of a US corporation operating in the US, is well within the purview of Congress. The constitutional review would at best be a rational basis test which would be easily passed: Congress could simply list all the bad things the CCP does. There's no requirement that it treat all foreign governments exactly the same, nor all foreign ownership, nor even all CCCP ownership.
The "foreign ownership discrimination" is literally only happening because of a highly explicit desire to commit viewpoint discrimination with regard to the media content consumed by Americans. (That's why Lamont is relevant.) Propose a neutral rule of general applicability that incidentally would result in the divestiture of Chinese ownership of TikTok and we can have an intelligible discussion on the subject.
But someone could buy TikTok and make it *even more stringently pro-China* and they’d be fine! Change the app icon to the China flag!
I don't think it's unintelligible just because people aren't reaching the same conclusion.
But I'll take one last crack. The US government could without a doubt blanket ban any Chinese government ownership of US corporations. They could then carve out exceptions until there's almost nothing banned except TikTok. But I don't think they need to be that clever. They could ban ownership of any corporation that produces, owns, or markets software programs or applications. That covers tiktok, and maybe adds in they can't have interests in Amazon, IBM, Cisco, etc. Then, assuming a US citizen gets standing to challenge the law, what's the remedy that they could demand? Is the Court really able to issue an order compelling the US government to grant a foreign government an entitlement to property rights in the US, That would be a huge intrusion on the Legislative and Executive branches power to conduct foreign policy.
We today have seized hundreds of millions of assets of foreign governments for what we declared to be their bad actions. If those assets happened to be TikTok or some other media firm would that protect them from seizure?
Lamont is not implicated. It says,
“The Act sets administrative officials astride the flow of mail to inspect it, appraise it, write the addressee about it, and await a response before dispatching the mail.”
The Senate bill does nothing of the sort.
"No no it's not viewpoint discrimination, it's this totally different thing that we definitely have the power to do and it's just a coincidence that it's going to result in the viewpoint discrimination that everyone voting for it has made clear they desire."
You can't just sidestep the first amendment by being clever.
Do we have the power to do it, or not?
I think that in practice, the US government can do that as long as they can get the judiciary to sign off on it.
“Is it viewpoint discrimination or foreign ownership discrimination?”
It doesn’t matter. The question is whether the pending bill is acting as a legitimate means to (quoting from the Senate version), “protect the national security of the United States.”
And it's frustrating that Matt doesn't acknowledge the legal problems with making this analogy.
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's because I think you're mistaking it AS a legal analogy. It's not. It's about norms and what we'd pragmatically tolerate.
As I also mentioned on that response, Potter Stewart wasn't arguing for having zero norms, he was arguing for being pragmatic. Were he still alive and serving, he'd probably take one look at TikTok and be like, "Yep, that's propaganda."
I mention the legal problems to illuminate the principles I think we should have in not letting governments being able to declare which platforms of expressive content we should restrict. You disagree with that, but I think that's a power that can go very wrong if established.
“…that's a power that can go very wrong if established
Yup: Like tariffs on commodities predicated on national security. That *can* be a legit exercise of government power, but also has been abused for political purposes.
“…Matt doesn't acknowledge the legal problems with making this analogy”
There is no such legal problem: It’s an analogy.
Are you arguing that the legal basis is different or that the rationale for CBS is strong and for TikTok is weak?
If it’s the legal basis, that’s based on the law. Congress passes a new law and the legal basis changes. The idea that foreign ownership/control of media distribution is constitutionally protected unless distribution is doing through publicly-owned airways doesn’t make much sense. Could you elaborate?
If it’s that limiting ownership of firms that use common airways is justified on moral/ethical/public policy grounds but limiting ownership of other means of distribution isn’t, I still don’t see the case for that.
"Are you arguing that the legal basis is different or that the rationale for CBS is strong and for TikTok is weak?"
Both.
The rationale for 1975 CBS is strong because SCOTUS had ruled decades earlier (in an era when First Amendment protections were vastly lower, BTW; it's questionable whether the Court would rule the same way today) that because the electromagnetic spectrum for radio (and later television) broadcasts was limited, (1) it was a public resource that was owned by the U.S. government, and thus (2) the U.S. government (through the FCC) had broad powers to control who was authorized to operate radio and television stations, with those powers being so broad that (3) the federal government could even permissibly discriminate against potential owners based on their political views so long as the FCC was able to come up with a halfway non-laugh inducing "public interest" rationale for the discrimination. (This same rationale also allowed the FCC to manipulate content on broadcast media in numerous ways, BTW, most obviously the Fairness Doctrine, but also restrictions on non-obscene indecency, special hours for children's programming, educational content requirements, etc.)
There is no such SCOTUS ruling holding that the internet is owned by the federal government. Further, the rationales given by SCOTUS for why the broadcast spectrum should be treated as federal property obviously have no applicability to the internet and, in fact, SCOTUS itself has specifically ruled in the past that the rationales for allowing federal regulation of broadcast media do not have applicability to cable television. Media consumed via the internet is obviously far more analogous to cable television than it is to broadcast media.
In terms of the "legal basis," foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected. However, the right of Americans to consume the media of their choice IS constitutionally protected, and SCOTUS has expressly found that includes the right even to consume foreign communist propaganda (Lamont v. Postmaster General). Further, under a mountain of SCOTUS precedent, the federal government generally may not engage in "viewpoint discrimination," i.e., it cannot favor one position on a topic versus another. If there was a proposal for a neutral rule of general applicability that would require Chinese ownership of TikTok to be divested, that could probably be done constitutionally. But that's NOT the proposal. The proposal is literally, "Get TikTok because we don't like the viewpoints it promotes." That's not constitutional.
Wait, what? The proposal is: "force divestiture of TikTok because it is owned by a parent company that is responsible to a hostile foreign power." You yourself acknowledge that "foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected." That becomes the ballgame.
I think an interesting thing here is that some lawyers on this thread seem to be struggling under the weight of precedents that were conceived in a very different technological context. Is the idea that if the Soviets owned a cable channel spewing Soviet propaganda that Congress could not ban it, because as a cable channel it wasn't distributed via the public airways? I think Matt's analogy is correct-- judges would have allowed Congress to act. Stare decisis yields to practical necessity, as it should here.
"You yourself acknowledge that 'foreign ownership/control of media distribution is not itself constitutionally protected.' That becomes the ballgame."
No, it's not the ballgame, because we're not talking about a proposal for a neutral rule of general applicability as I already explicitly pointed out in my final paragraph. The "rule" being proposed here is literally, "Let's get TikTok because we don't like the viewpoints it promotes."
To put it another way, there are all sorts of laws and regulations that on some level interfere with speech which are constitutionally permissible, but the question is to what extent they particularly interfere with speech (as compared to just incidentally interfere) and to what extent any such interference is motivated by trying to discriminate against particular speech. E.g., a 5% sales tax that applies to all retail sales, including books, magazines, and newspapers is constitutional even though on the margins it results in some suppression of free speech by making it more expensive to buy books, magazines, and newspapers. A 5% sales tax that applies ONLY to sales of books, magazines, and newspapers while other sorts of products that are not taxed, is more questionable and probably unconstitutional without some pretty clear showing of why it's needed. A 5% sales tax that applies ONLY to sales of books, magazines, and newspapers that espouse political views disapproved of by the U.S. government is blatantly unconstitutional.
"Is the idea that if the Soviets owned a cable channel spewing Soviet propaganda that Congress could not ban it, because as a cable channel it wasn't distributed via the public airways?"
Yes, that would almost certainly be correct under existing SCOTUS precedent -- if the Soviet Union could have convinced an American cable company to carry Soviet Central Television in the 1980s, then it would have been unconstitutional to pass a law banning it. You can say that SCOTUS should reach a *different* decision because [insert whatever reason you think is compelling], but it's intellectually dishonest to start from the point of saying, "Let's adopt [Policy X]," without also mentioning, "BTW, [Policy X] is almost certainly unconstitutional under existing precedent and we're going to have to litigate it all the way to SCOTUS to get a change in the law."
"if the Soviet Union could have convinced an American cable company to carry Soviet Central Television in the 1980s, then it would have been unconstitutional to pass a law banning it."
I'm somewhat surprised that this didn't happen, actually. Somebody at those firms must have decided that pay-per-view porn was OK, but whatever the Soviets were willing to pay to have their content distributed was not. Or maybe the Soviets just weren't sophisticated enough about American culture to try?
Well one obvious reason is that broadcasters broadcast all the time, and people may consume unintentionally, but you have to proactively choose to go to TikTok.
Is easy to see that the government doesn't posess this power for good reason. The CBS example is a poor one, that's about limited spectrum. This is closer to the government banning you from reading Pravda, which it can't.
The law is a tool. If it’s delivering bad outcomes new laws can be written. If the claim is CCP TikTok is constitutionally protected, it’s not obvious to me and I think Biden should have the fight.
The courts are one way to alter constitutional law.
The courts are the way to develop our understanding of the boundaries.
The correct way to alter constitutional law, when that's the intent from the outset, is the amendment process.
Uh... no. Did you all read the article? The videos on TikTok can and do exist on every social network.=
This is closer to the government *closing a store that sold Pravda*, which it absolutely can do. They have to have a reason other than "you can't sell Pravda", but they absolutely can close such a store.
If you can't think of legitimate national security reasons *other than the nature of some of its content* to ban tiktok, you literally are not paying attention.
The CBS example is analogy, not a legal justification.
If the Soviet Union had bought Waldenbooks and turned it into Pravdabooks, could the government compel Pravdabooks to be sold to an American company, with no restrictions on what the new company would sell?
You definitely can't do it on the basis of the content of the books Pravdabooks is selling. Now if you're talking broader Iron Curtain style prohibitions on all economic activity you can maybe shut them down, but it's different reasoning that sweeps a lot broader than banning tiktok because of the propaganda content.
But could you do it on the basis on Pravdabooks being owned by the Soviet Union? Just as we are forcing the sale of TikTok, not because of its content, but because it's owned by a company in a hostile nation?
"Just as we are forcing the sale of TikTok, not because of its content, but because it's owned by a company in a hostile nation?"
The problem with that rationale is that several dozen members of Congress have already completely **** the bed by being explicit that their main animating concern is viewpoint discrimination. In the First Amendment context, the courts have generally been very willing to look at what politicians have indicated about their reasons for pursuing facially non-viewpoint discriminatory restrictions on speech when assessing the constitutionality of particular laws. SCOTUS struck down a Louisiana state 2% tax on gross receipts of newspapers with circulations of more than 20,000 copies per week in Grosjean v. American Press Co. because that threshold appeared to coincide with punishing a particular newspaper that had been critical of Huey Long.
It may be that in the progress of this particular debate, Congresspersons have exposed themselves to the charge that they're discriminating on viewpoint. That's pretty different from what I took you, Matt, and others opposing this bill to be saying, that forcing ByteDance to divest would be unconstitutional regardless of what Congresspersons said about why they were doing it.
You could make a case for Iron Curtain 2.0 where Apple and Tesla and Amazon aren't allowed to do business with the CCP anymore in which you also force ByteDance to sell tiktok. You cannot obscure attacking tiktok for its content by pretending Cold War 2 is on when it's not.
As sometimes happens when I converse with you, I'm not sure, when you say "you cannot," if you're saying this is illegal/prohibited, or if you're saying more like "you must not," like it would be wrong to do even if legal. I'm asking, in a limited way, if it is legal to force a foreign company's divestiture, or not.
It's kind of mind-boggling. Tyler Cowen yesterday https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/03/tiktok-divestiture.html and previously https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/should-the-united-states-ban-tiktok.html is essentially some combination of an isolated demand for rigor, appeals to fairly totalized free speech, and a broad dismissal of the power of foreign propaganda. I may admire Tyler's commitment to his libertarian principles, but I don't admire the principles themselves nor where they lead him in this instance.
Cowen is up there with Taibbi, Haidt, Greenwald, and Sullivan (wow, nice law firm name right there).
There’s a very narrow range on which I respect his judgment. Elsewhere, it’s broken.
I'd distinguish Haidt a bit from that list.
Matt himself also gets weirdly and wrongly lumped into that crew too.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1767200853813780876
“TARL”? Wuzzat?
Wild article, to be sure.
Haidt takes MFT too far, that's my big knock on him. He reflexively analyzes every problem through that lens, same as Taibbi and Greenwald do with antiwar/anti-surveillance politics.
Andrew Sullivan is a true conservative and at times gets caught up in Culture Wars but his name belongs nowhere near Taibbi's and Greenwald's, who have completely lost their minds in recent years.
I would not including Tyler in a group of Russian propagandists/trolls.
This is an interesting list for determining one’s thinking. Ben below objects to Haidt being in this “bad list”
I cannot listen to Greenwald at all. Taibbi is interesting and reasonable when he talks but gets out there for me in his writing. Haidt seems like a good social psychologist and I like Andrew Sullivan a great hero for gay people are even if he doesn’t get credit. He’s also very intellectually curious and interesting. I like his podcast.
Tyler Cowen an interesting guy and seems super knowledgeable on lots of things. I like his podcast.
I am curious what your good list looks like.
Muccigrosso is a down-the-line standard-bearing party man Democrat, so I suspect his good list would mostly consist of writers who criticize the Dems less.
He’s a libertarian who is open to learning. He is not a pragmatist nor does he need to be.
I think the PRC government has already signaled they won't allow a forced sale. Maybe that's a bluff. Maybe not. But I suspect some of the qualms people have about the proposal before Congress flow from the fact that, if China is serious about not playing ball, we'll soon see TikTok banned in the US. I don't use it myself, but I gather a lot of marketers, ad agencies, influencers and creatives use it. In other words, there's a difference between opposing the end of CCP control of a platform, and banning the platform.
The fact that the CCP is playing hardball ALREADY is evidence of their intent.
It's evidence of their intent to block the forced sale, agreed. Was there a question about that?
It's evidence that they care about this as more than a mere issue of setting up a shell company for foreign ownership.
Notably, the CCP are also dealing with a round of nationalizations and defaults of failed BRI projects abroad. And while they're understandably opposing those nationalizations and defaults, they *aren't* sending alarming push notifications to those countries' populations casting the disputes as "theft" or "bans" on Chinese business activity.
Did you know that the CCP recently banned foreign companies from operating in their economy? They require them to set up domestically-held "foreign-funded enterprises" that enable domestic control (by the CCP). All WOFEs are being forced to become FFEs by next year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterprise
[Ed: THAT tells me that they're extremely invested in making sure nobody BUT the CCP gets to say what any company that does any business anywhere in China does. It's not that I believe in "tit for tat" - I don't, except when I'm not at my best. It's not that I believe in applying draconian rules like their own to OUR shores -- I'm perfectly fine with the VAST MAJORITY of foreign companies, even ones I don't like, doing their business here with no interference. But the fact that they're doing it on their own shores, and the fact that they're disproportionately mobilizing their response to defend the one company that theoretically poses a propaganda risk to America (among other countries), tells me that their intentions are NOT peaceful. They may dislike the idea of war just as much as we dislike it ourselves, but no one here should be under any illusion that they aren't trying to edge us out with whatever "peaceful" advantage they can get, like a massive propaganda psy-op. As someone committed to the freedoms of liberal democracy, I refuse to accept our specific commitment to free speech as a suicide pact in the face of such a threat.]
Marketers and ad agencies will be totally fine switching to whatever the new platform is. Influencers and creatives won’t necessarily be happy with the shakeup caused by the move, but some will surely do well.
I tend to agree, Matt. But Trump’s point about giving even more power to folks like Zuckerberg, who interfered blatantly in the 2020 election, is a valid one. I can understand why leftists, whose cause was helped by the 2020 election interference, would see no problem, but frankly, I’m not sure who my bigger enemy is. Just to remind you: In 2020 folks were being banned/censored for posting the truth about covid origins, Hunter Biden’s laptop, BLM/Antifa crimes, mask effectiveness and other things.
The CBS analogy is perfect. By using 1975, it also shows how much the media environment has changed in the last 50 years after Watergate. The shackles are off. By hiding behind "Free Speech", we are at risk of handing over the keys (again) of our nuclear arsenal to someone completely willing to sell it to the highest bidder. The FCC, like all of our regulatory bodies, has not been able to keep up with technology or the changing times. They are always fighting yesterdays corruption and ill-prepared to handle today or tomorrow's new schemes.
"By hiding behind "Free Speech", we are at risk of handing over the keys (again) of our nuclear arsenal to someone completely willing to sell it to the highest bidder."
What does Tiktok have to do with The Football?
The fact that the CCP was able to mobilize tens of thousands of people to protest our government on a false pretense here should scare the fuck out of us.
My position is simple. I want a button that shuts down CCP bullshit like this. I want an American engineer’s finger on that button. I want their paycheck signed by an American executive. I want that executive’s shareholders to hold their stock on an American exchange - stock that is NOT revocable merely for criticizing the company.
I think that’s a fair ask.
Also, teenagers are dumb.
Indeed, which is why we don't let them vote.
Helpful reminder that our host favors abolishing age restrictions on voting.
Well he's very wrong about that.
And if kids were likely to overwhelming Republicans, he wouldn't support it anyways.
Young adults are already infamous for having low voter turnout--it would likely be even lower still for teenagers.
There just isn't a good reason to allow kids to vote.
If their brains aren't developed enough to choose whether they get to drink, or smoke, or drive, or take out plans...they also aren't mature enough to vote.
MattY is open to being wrong.
He things civic participation is important and teaching it via voting in school would be valuable. I understand this idea. I also think teens are often silly.
Which is why we do mock elections in our schools.
IMO that should be mandatory, so that it trains kids how to vote.
"Now students, let me teach you about a little something called ranked choice voting..."
Agreed. My daughter's schools have done that since elementary school. Among other benefits, the fact that only 2 of 538 students at her Elementary School voted for Trump in their mock election in 2016 really helped her feel a little bit more emotionally safe in the aftermath when I think she and a lot of other kids who watched the real results were wondering if what the adults in their lives said about honesty, trust, kindness, bullying, or hard work was all BS.
I think more civics classes that get kids to attend city council meetings and tour local government services like the water treatment plant (we did that, though it was right down the street) are things kids need.
“How It Works” civics edition.
I generally have been one of the more respectful voices about current teens in this space. I think they are better educated than they are being given credit for and their ideas have more merit than people who just view them as "woke" and are more self-directed about their gender choices that many folks believe.
I don't think we should reduce the voting age below 18. (If anything, we should think about increasing the driving age to 18. I would even be open to reducing the drinking age to 18 so that we don't have unenforced rules on the books.)
Voting is a significant right and responsibility that comes with being an adult citizen of this country. I think teens deserve the chance to mature get more informed about US history and civics before they are asked to participate in that process and I do worry that parents will potentially pressure teens to vote in line with their own voting wishes in distorted ways.
I would be interested in a non-binding advisory vote for kids 16 to 18 in elections to get them registered, allow them to learn the voting process, and practice before they get a real vote.
I am fairly certain that reducing the voting age to 16 or 14 would greatly help my candidates in almost any election in my state so this isn't about self-interest. It is more about giving kids the space to explore their political values and ideas before giving them this kind of weighty responsibility.
I've gotten to talk to my daughter's friends about some weighty issues over the last few years including the complex situation in Gaza. My experience has been that they often jump immediately to easy answers that are popular in their bubble of social media. But when given historical context and allowed to have a real conversation about the complexity of the situation and competing interests and needs they come to diverse, reasonable, and thoughtful places. I have a lot of faith in them as voters for 2026 when they will finally get to vote but I don't want to rush that.
What about Nick’s Kid Choice Awards?
Kids care way more about slime than politics.
…If only that were true, David…
This was such an unforced error by ByteDance and really seems to have solidified the bill passing. It is hard to fathom why they thought that demonstrating the very power people are concerned about would help them here. Goes to show these decisions are being made in Beijing because I can't imagine an American PR person would be this stupid
Never underestimate the power of an American PR person to be really stupid.
Fair point!
Maybe it's just a demonstration of power - show they own our kids, then show they own the next president, then sit back and watch while the dysfunctional government fails to do anything about it...
What happens when that button is pushed by future governments that shuts down foreign government information critical of the United States where you'd think the criticism is warranted?
There’s no slippery slope here—banning tiltok is a no-brainer yet it’s taken Congress years to act.
We're talking about ONE button at ONE company directed at ONE adversary.
The BBC remains perfectly free to run critical content of the US in the US, just as our own media run critical content of the royals over there.
Hell, AL FREAKING JAZEERA remains perfectly free to run critical content of the US, and does it every day.
However, neither of them, nor their respective governments, is entitled to run a service that beams addictive short-form videos into our childrens' brains every day, operate censorious policies on said service, nor pose a risk of releasing propaganda-posing-as-content that is designed to adversarially undermine our geopolitical interests at key moments.
Where does critical content turn into propaganda, and how do you define that?
I'd pose the question back to you: How do YOU differentiate between propaganda and criticism? Because it doesn't seem like you have elucidated ANY kind of difference.
I'd say that a good place to start defining propaganda is "When the CCP blitzes dozens of videos to Americans' TikTok feeds that seek to justify to them -- through truth OR falsehood -- an invasion of Taiwan, such that it politically undermines any otherwise reasoned response to said invasion".
To be clear: I'm trying to separate the propaganda from the ultimate decision our leaders make. If a President Biden in 2026 decided in his heart of hearts not to defend Taiwan, then fine -- that's his decision, that's why we elect leaders like him, to make the big decisions.
What I *don't* want to see is a repeat of last Friday on steroids, where millions of now-voting-age Zoomers start flooding Congressional offices demanding that Congress stop President Biden before he engages in "imperialist aggression", all because the CCP released dozens of videos on TikTok making themselves out to be some poor victimized country that must defend themselves from imperialist Taiwanese aggression, in advance of the CCP themselves committing an aggressive imperialist invasion of Taiwan.
Basically, a replay of the cynical play we saw Russia run before invading Ukraine, except for 100x more effective because of TikTok's scale and the implicit trust that being addicted to it confers on unsuspecting Zoomers.
THAT's propaganda, not mere criticism.
I don't think you can legally distinguish between criticism and propaganda without running into severe First Amendment problems. That's why I'm challenging this--it's the problem Potter Stewart ran into when he said "I know it when I see it.". Socially, we're all allowed to define the terms however we want, and be vocally critical of what we think is bad. I'd be fine with that, and I'd likely find many overlaps of agreement! It's good to counter speech we think is bad with our own speech.
Stewart was arguing in favor of pragmatism, not against having any standards at all.
Fundamentally, I think this is an issue not of speech, but of platforms. The same videos can be disseminated on many different platforms. Any individual video's speech is not being prohibited. Even during the Cold War, we didn't ban Pravda.
However, regardless of whether there was ever an explicit ban, there certainly was an implicit societal norm against anyone ever contemplating letting Pravda own PBS, CBS, or any other media outlet beyond operating its own niche press operations. Matt's example isn't about the specifics or legalities, it's about this *norm*.
TikTok undermines that norm, because it's already INSIDE millions of Americans' media diets, distributing mostly perfectly unobjectionable speech. Pravda never managed that feat, let alone any other Soviet institution.
The point is, the platform's ownership and operation matters, irrespective of how permissible its content is. We never would have allowed the Soviets to sell us millions of kids' radios that could be tuned, from Russia, onto a Pravda broadcast at a moment's notice. We simply never would have allowed it.
You keep acting like this is about some specific item of content. It isn't. It's about the platform. The platform itself is the threat, and it's well within our laws to limit that threat while maintaining freedom of speech ON the platform.
After all, what do you think is going to happen if/when this sale gets forced? The American subsidiary's daily operations would barely change. It would operate the same way that hundreds of other subsidiaries already do within America. The only difference is that when the order came from the CCP to distribute "The Taiwan Videos" -- videos that will doubtlessly be played on many other platforms -- the US government can say "yeah, we're not going to let that get beamed directly to millions of our children without any context". Many children will still see the videos, just like many of them still see ISIS beheadings and Russia Today videos. We just won't have millions of them getting lied to and having that lie psychologically anchored into our electorate for the next 80 years.
But China being deterred from invading Taiwan is not contingent on viral 7 second video clips for Zoomers. It's the lack of greater naval defense spending because people in Congress have competing priorities for future spending.
I'm not concerned about China being deterred by the videos so much as I am by China using those videos to deter *US*.
This is also about where I am. Social media is fundamentally different from most of the other fact patterns we've seen brought up in a way that makes me OK with treating it differently.
Government-operated website/cable media like BBC, Al Jazeera, and Russia Today have limited ability to choose who sees what and very little ability to learn about individual Americans. Further, these media outlets also have vast competition, mostly adult audiences, and provide little to no interaction between users.
Broadcast propaganda like shortwave Voice of Moscow has no ability to choose who hears what, cannot learn about individual Americans, and provides no interaction between users.
Lamont v. Postmaster General dealt with a situation in which a small amount of communist publication was moving via USPS to individual Americans (who, as far as I can tell, were already interested in communism).
In contrast, successful social media platforms allow targeting information at the individual level, are popular with children, have a very wide reach, allow the operator to learn about individual Americans, feature significant interaction between users, reach users who aren't specifically interested in news from a particular country or with a particular political view, and have limited competition due to the nature of user-based content.
Why should foreign governments control our media channels? Foreign private media channels is another thing entirely
What is TikTok controlling? They built a platform from scratch that people chose to sign up for and use.
They're censoring content on it. And now just last week they proved-the-concept that they can tell a wholesale lie to our kids and get them to call Congress over it.
Censoring content on their own platform...which is something every platform has the power to do. And what's the latest wholesale lie you're referring to here?
Moderation is not censorship. Every platform moderates. Most don't censor, or at most, they censor to "community standards" like "no nudity" that match widely-accepted public indecency laws.
The lie is that they characterized the current bill as a "ban" when in fact it merely would force a sale. They sent it as a push notification to all of their users, and it was designed to create a user panic. Notably, many of those users did NOT exercise proper information hygiene and check the claims against multiple sources; instead, they panicked and started calling Congress. That's *A Problem* regardless of whether you or I can snootily sit here whining about how they should have exercised proper information hygiene.
How do you know it was the CCP and not some American ByteDance executive in California?
It’s much more typical of Chinese media/influence strategy than American. There’s a reason that Zuckerberg didn’t send a push to everyone telling them to call up Ted Cruz in advance of those social media hearings a few weeks ago.
Look at the hilariously inept "wolf warrior" diplomacy they tried a couple of years ago.
Maybe.
Agree. And much of Matt’s take on trumps lack of principle toward China actually also applies to Elon musk’s various positions according to his X account. What could have been viewed as a somewhat principled free speech stance around the time he took over the platform has morphed into an account that just constantly promotes right wing propaganda. I assume it’s out of self interest it’s just too transparently political. Obviously Matt’s already written about that but reading this article has helped my brain recalibrate musk as relatively trumpy.
Also, I want the Justice Department/FTC/FCC agreement governing the deal to entitle that engineer to whistleblower/“good faith” protections against getting fired over any decisions where they feel US citizens are being manipulated or at risk thereof.
So basically with respect to social-media ownership, you're an economic nationalist?
David, can you provide a link to a report about this incident? Google is not helping, and this is the first I've heard of it.
I'm quite the advocate for free trade but I wholeheartedly support the following proposals:
-if American social media companies are banned in a given country, then that country's social media companies can't operate in America
-Exporting movies to China is illegal
Americas cultural exports are the strongest weapon we have bar none. It’s the reason they learn English in China and we can barely speak Spanish here
Source for these numbers? I'm seeing .9% of China speaking English vs about 13% Spanish speakers in US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
That less than 1% excludes Hong Kong rather arbitrarily given its political situation so the real number is closer to 1.2% when you add in those $3 million excluded speakers. But the numbers are still low.
Chinese is also the second most difficult language for English Speakers to learn (Korean is the hardest) and English is the hardest language for Chinese speakers to learn. Chinese does not have verb tenses. It does not have gendered nouns or pronouns. It is tonal so that each letter sound has four distinct meanings but has fewer distinguishable letter sounds. Its writing is pictographic rather than phonic. There is no a word for "some" every noun has its own grouping word sort of like "bushel" that is used when making something plural. There is not system of otherwise indicating plural. There is no word for yes. There is no word for no.
China also allows very little international immigration and so has view people born abroad in English speaking countries outside of Hong Kong or children of native English speakers who speak English at home.
The fact that 13 million people in China speak English probably is good evidence of our cultural strength given its difficulty.
But yeah, the idea that we can barely speak Spanish is a bit off. I think Spanish speaking rates vary across the country quite a bit so there may be places where that is true but definitely not the West Coast. My daughter is learning Spanish in high school because it will be necessary for her if she wants to be a nurse in our area given the high rates of Spanish first language speakers here. Plus her own school has such high rates of Spanish as a first language that she would miss out on 1/3 of her ease-droping opportunities if she couldn't speak it.
The problem is the incentives faced by movie makers trying to earn profits in the Chinese market. I'm dubious about "soft power" generally, but if you want to preserve it while aligning Hollywood's incentives, just rule that Hollywood movies can't benefit from copyright protections overseas. Give the movies away, but don't sell them.
I wouldn't necessarily ban exporting the movies outright. But I would start providing more tools that allow us monetize movies while evading Chinese censorship.
Like, why the hell isn't Radio Free Asia running a massive bootleg DVD operation?
Honestly I envy them for not having to watch Multiverse of Madness.
How about a 95% tax on revenues from US movies shown in China?
How would you define this distinction if Tiktok was an American company that just licenses the underlying tech and social network and content mainly from a foreign country, in ways that makes editorial decisions completely opaque?
Could still quite easily have a CCP agent in there, doing exactly what Matt is saying.
Good thing we have FARA
What about dual citizens?
"How would you define this distinction if Tiktok was an American company that just licenses the underlying tech and social network and content mainly from a foreign country, in ways that makes editorial decisions completely opaque?"
I think that might be an acceptable outcome, TBH.
Also worth noting: The CCP bans our social media and internet companies — facebook/instagram/meta, google, twitter/x, reddit and even pinterest. Besides the reason Matt outlines, you can think of banning TikTok as a similar to a retaliatory tariff. Something we have no problem doing.
Except we have principles of free speech that they don't, which makes us better.
It doesn’t mean we should abide unequal treaties with the CCP.
Yes, it does. We should not abridge our core liberal constitutional values.
As Matt says, Americans can always post on other apps and maintain all their rights.
A foreign business, employing agents of a adversarial foreign government, who won't explain how and why they make decisions, and have already shown they're lying about protections, maintaining the license to do business in the US, is not a matter of free speech.
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows to fight China we must become more like China.
It makes us weaker, in this instance.
It doesn't have to. We can use our speech to make the case that people should not be engaging in their speech and indulging the speech of others in this manner. I'd likely do so for TikTok--I can't stand it!
I think we basically have no hope of doing this against those already addicted to the TikTok algorithm's dopamine drip.
There may not be an actual chemical dependency, but this stuff is addictive as hell.
We're still better if we ban foreign platforms only as a *retaliatory* measure.
The mechanism is that the apps would not get updates via main marketplaces. No new downloads or updates. Eventually existing installations would become incompatible with updates to OS software or phone upgrades.
Can't you update through a VPN?
You are giving too much credit to the moral zoomer.
This piece features some of Matt’s most effective anti-Trump rhetoric to date. “Trump will sell you out” is provably true *and* could work with jaded moderates who don’t think “our norms” are worth defending. In fact, talking about our norms can comes off as something between officious and priggish— I long thought pre-Trump politics took decorum too far.
Absolutely. The defining principle of Trump is that he, in fact, has no actual principles aside from naked self-interest. He will sell out his allies on every single issue under the sun if he thinks it will benefit him in some way personally. The four years of the Trump presidency were a ritual of watching Republicans push some issue or law because Trump had weakly supported it only for him to saw off the branch as soon as they stepped on it because public sentiment turned against it.
We're now seeing this unfold right before our eyes with regards to this very issue. Republicans and their sycophants are twisting and turning to find ways to argue banning Tik Tok is actually censorious - just because Trump is now Pro Tik-Tok.
It's censorious, no twisting or turning needed.
As we get closer to November, Biden might say “there wouldn’t be a border crisis if Trump had built and staffed the wall.”
I tell people that they can vote for him if they think the interests of his particular financial beneficiaries aligns with their own ideological interests. What you CAN'T do is vote for Trump hoping your ideological interests align with his because those barely exist. Seems like a big gamble if you don't have the financial means to pay him yourself.
But people still like trying to anticipate the moves of crypto whales and outright gamble so maybe it's not that persuasive an argument.
I know this is beside the point and pretty old discourse, but both the hypocrisy from Republicans (whatever scummy stuff Hunter does, it pales in comparison to this) and the inability of any legal institutions to stop this is so enraging.
I appreciate the concern over Chinese control over TikTok and I'm not totally sure what I think about it. However, I think it's hard to be concerned about this and (coherently) not take worries about political bias of major social media companies more seriously than the left generally does. If the line that we don't know how much bias is present in the algorithm works for TikTok than it works for Facebook and Twitter too no?
Yes, as a big supporter of the first amendment I appreciate that the feds can't just go in and demand these companies change their messaging. But the left could at least publicly say it's bad and problematic when social media favors or disfavors political views that aren't (despite the fact you and I might wish they were) outside the Overton window of American political life. And the feds could investigate bills that reduce the power of network effects to create natural monopolies (eg various kinds of interoperability rules).
I certainly don't like the situation re CCP and TikTok but it also makes me uncomfortable for the government to move against a platform because of the viewpoint it might express so I don't really know what to think. However, it certainly feels to me there is a certain lack of consistency here -- or at least appreciation that people could have justified concerns here.
Remember the (likely to be successful) argument against the constitutionality of the TX and FL social media bills was exactly that choices made about what to favor or suppress are speech by the company.
Agree with this. I'm open to arguments about requiring transparency in algorithms and restrictions on politically motivated content moderation, etc etc. even though the Florida and Texas laws seem extremely poorly drafted and misguided in ways.
This "ban propaganda" argument is far weaker. Like, maybe the FCC would get away with keeping the Soviets off broadcast tv with a limited spectrum argument, but this is more akin to saying the government can ban you from reading Pravda, or more contemporaneously , streaming al-jazeera or RT or reading Glenn Greenwald's substack.
Honestly I've just talked myself into concluding it's a truly sinister idea.
Agreed. Also, whatever happened to the Oracle element? Supposedly this US tech giant was tapped to physically house the data of US TikTok users. Maybe it was all bullshit and/or this is technically infeasible. Maybe! It's definitely above my paygrade in terms of tech knowledge. But I'd like to hear a bit more about it either way. It seems to me this solution plus a "kill switch" that can be used if we actually go to war with China might be a less draconian solution than yanking the rug out from under the feet of TikTok's millions of American users, many of whom use the platform to earn a living. I'm reluctant to see our country retreat from the openness that has long characterized its tech and media spheres, and I'm worried we'll be a party of one on this among rich nations. Are France and Britain and Australia and Japan going to join us? I'd honestly feel better if they were. But I doubt they will.
For the record I accept the evidence that the Communist Party leverages its control of the platform for PR purposes, but their efforts seem to be pretty ineffective. China's about as popular in the US as a case of shingles, and Beijing doesn't seem to be winning the media wars when it comes to such topics as Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The narratives around such stories appear to be highly damaging to China's image both in the US and in other countries.
Edit: Meant to add: the above was written in reflection of my belief that what's before Congress will ultimately cause TikTok to be banned in the United States. A mere forced sale is less objectionable, but also, I think, a pipe dream.
To give the other side of the argument and why I'm unsure about it is that what if the CCP just starts offering cheap financing (effectively paying them) to social media companies that bury all posts critical of them? So it's not just one outlet but all outlets?
That's why I think it's a tough issue. Or at least one I feel I need to think about more.
I think there's a solid argument that, when a social media company purports to serve you a feed of user generated content based on your interests there should by a high bar against things that are not that. Any time an algorithm is promoting or hiding content based on inputs that are not coming from me, the user, I at the very least have a right to know, in detail, what outside choices are influencing my feed, and maybe even it rightly opens the company up to liability for those decisions.
Having previously worked at google trying to target ads I can tell you that's a lot harder distinction to make than you might realized.
For instance, when targeting ads google had to make calls like we aren't going to target ads (or even save data on) based on your visits to websites in sensitive areas like healthcare, porn etc. Sure, that would sell more products but it would creep people out and make them less trusting of the platform with their data.
Now that's about ads but social networks have to make similar choices. Is it ok to say, hmm people seem to find it more creepy if their feed is suddenly all Nazi content because they were curious about some pro-nazi account in the news and clicked like on a reply to the account (say the algo doesn't do sentiment analysis on pos vs neg replies)?
What if the app just wants to be fun and frivolous? Can it deprioritize political stuff generally? Is it enough if they tell you that they try to serve fun uplifting content everyone enjoys?
I mean ultimately I agree with you in principle but I just don't see how you can meaningfully operationalize this against an actor you don't really trust or has very different values.
I think the important regulatory distinction that doesn't really exist is between user-curated products and editorial ones. Or even components within a product, Spotify lets your search for stuff and make your own playlist, but you can also ask it to DJ for you. It offers both things, the problem is where these companies offer a user curated feed and then put their thumb on the scales in opaque ways. Maybe the answer is that, if companies want to be covered by something like section 230, they are required to self-select features into the "user curated" category at which point they're required to give the user what they ask for in a universal way, the bad stuff with the good.
That, too, is far harder than you might imagine.
Given a rich repository of user generated content upon which to draw from, any decision which intentionally causes the next video to be next is ultimately an editorial decision.
There's no such thing as purely what the "user" asks for. There's the concept of categorizing the content in the first place, and that's virtually always ambiguous and up for debate. There's also a spectrum of ok - these are all in category A, which you say you want to see. What deterministic mechanism will we use to determine which priority and ordering to feed those to you.
The algorithm will always have an aspect of optimization to keep you engaged and wanting more, that's the self-interest of the platform. The only difference is how well they hide/disguise it, and how much puffery they write to plausibly provide an alternate explanation that fits the fact pattern afterward.
Ultimately, that should just be left up to users. If they think that algorithmically curated lists are bad, they can put in the work to build their own. That's what I always do.
After some thought I think that maybe a transparency requirement plus a requirement that the team implementing this algorithm be us persons based in the us might be sufficient.
I'm surprised you just talked yourself into it, knowing your principles I figured you'd have had that take long ago.
It's early, it took me a minute to sort my way through to this being one of the truly bad arguments against social media. As usual it's the government's fault... Stupid DST.
I hear you. I actually didn't think I'd wake up early for this one, but I was exhausted from a really busy day yesterday that I knew was coming, and called it a night quite early.
There's the "ban propaganda" argument as well as the "it's an opaque algorithm" with "employees overseas who will never go on record" argument.
If Glenn Greenwald or Rupert Murdoch were really mainlining Putin's speeches, it's at least clear they're doing uniformly, and could be subpoenaed if they somehow did a Camrbidge Analytica, or tracked some rival journalists phone for publishing an expose, as ByteDance has the power to do.
I'm absolutely open to the "opaque algorithms subject to undisclosed manipulation" arguments, but those apply every bit as much to Google/Facebook/Twitter as tiktok.
Okay, and now there was that bit about "employees overseas who will never go on record" especially one's who are subject to CCP threats and without the protections of American law. Or even their leadership. Remember Jack Ma?
Why are you only slowly capable of addressing each point, or even all the points together in concert?
At this point aren't we just talking about full blown Iron Curtain 2.0? Prohibiting anyone we deem to be subject to the malign influence of the CCP from engaging in economic activity in the US? I mean, maybe we are, but we're talking about essentially dropping a gigantic bomb on the global economy, and I'm not even confident Iron Curtain 2.0 extends all that effectively to information on the Internet.
I already addressed this type of argument with the comments about Gleenwald and Murdoch.
Again, why are you not capable of addressing the points in concert?
But it is truly amazing you think divesting Tiktok to an American company would be "dropping a gigantic bomb on the global economy." That type of argument as absurdum really shows how serious you're taking the topic and well how you understand Matt's article.
I wonder if companies shouldn’t be made to reveal algorithms, the same way we ask Betty Crocker (or whoever) to give us the nutritional content of the cake mix. Half formed thought based on my desire not to restrict speech, combined with my belief that some of these algorithms turn out to be very harmful.
I'm open to the idea they should have to disclose any inputs they are adding to the algorithm that aren't coming from the user themself.
I wonder how much good that would do, though. Algorithms are a lot more complicated than the number of calories in a serving of cake mix--I wonder if there would be a way to ELI5 what's going on effectively.
To me transparency about algorithm is the real issue and I don't think it is limited to TikTok although there is probably reason to believe that PRC would be more likely to sucessfully pressure a company to use it for state purposes. I feel like one of the big differences between social media and other media is that social media makes it seem like anyone can post content and what you are getting might be moderated but is basically reflective of what your friends, family, and people you have chosen to follow have posted when there is this invisible algorithm curating the work. If I read the Stranger, the local weekly that started out as a movie times, personal ads and sex advice and is now the second most read news publication in Seattle and considered by many to be their most trusted source of news, I am clear that this paper has an editorial staff who hire reports who find or are assigned news stories and features that are then edited and the editorial staff also drafts editorials as well. If i get a copy of the Stranger, it is just like the one my neighbor got. I know it's political bent. The Seattle Times is similar with a different bent and I can see both bents in part because of the editorials that they publish. The paper has ads which I know are ads and that are trying to sell me something. They both try to fact check and if they get something wrong they could be sued so that are motivated to be careful. But with Facebook, the content for each user is different and it is being delivered to you without transparency about why you are seeing what you are seeing or what its source is. The line between natural and sponsored content is murky and the platforms seem to favor extremism and polarizing content and there is really no fact checking.
I appreciate the sentiment but I think it's a lot harder to regulate transparency here than one might think.
The problem is that these are complex systems and there are all sorts of seemingly innocuous choices in designing and training the system that can be tweaked to have the desired effect.
I think you need a combination of some kind of transparency report plus a requirement that the team designing this part of the algorithm be us based and consist of us persons.
I think that the thing I find most pernicious about TikTok as a propaganda organ is the fact that a: it isn’t obviously labeled as such and b: it promotes views by subtly increasing or decreasing how much exposure particular content gets rather than articulating a view.
I’m not worried about “Americans reading Pravda” type cases because Pravda was obviously Soviet government propaganda and most Americans were able to use that information to make judgments about the source. There just isn’t that sort of informed consent with TikTok.
I think I’d be okay with a remedy that forced TikTok to be much more transparent about how its content promotion algorithms worked, and allowed external observers to monitor it. I would also be okay with similar principles being applied to US adtech companies.
Yes, I wouldn't be thrilled with it, but a Proposition 65 style notice (e.g., "ATTENTION: This application is known to the U.S. government to use algorithmic methods to select the content displayed to you and may not represent a random sample of content available on the application.") would probably be constitutional, but it would have to be applied to all websites using algorithmic methods to select the content that is displayed to users. (Which would effectively be every commercial media website and probably many or most non-commercial ones too.)
That seems feasible, frankly. (Not to say it's necessarily going to be effective.) There are only so many mediums via which online content can be viewed, and it wouldn't be too hard for a given browser or App Store to implement these warnings.
Compiling official lists of "propagandistic" platforms sounds like an unfun, contentious undertaking. But ultimately it could be a list of domain names and like, EINs.
Right, there is a massive difference between someone knowing reading and consuming a foreign government's propaganda and someone unknowingly consuming a foreign government's propaganda because it's nefariously integrated into a product via opaque algorithms.
Before I push back yet again on Matt's take here, I do want to make clear some agreements that I have that I should have before. And that starts with saying that I hate TikTok with the heat of a thousand suns and think it's bad. The stop and go video format, the gaudy subtitles filled with emojis, the lack of full video controls and, of course, evil autoplay, it's all bad and I hate it. I don't particularly buy an argument of addiction when it comes to any information dissemination, but I certainly have no problem saying we'd be better off without this format. And while I haven't seen enough evidence yet to definitively say that the CCP is using it to spy and shoot off propaganda, it seems plausible to me, and being owned by the CCP is certainly another demerit against a social media platform I already hate.
However...banning TikTok (and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick) is a major First Amendment breach, and it's really frustrating that Matt still hasn't engaged in this with his take. I'm sure srynerson will be here at some point to state once again the Supreme Court case that decided it, but people have the First Amendment right to read foreign propaganda from a hostile government. And defining what is propaganda and who is a hostile governmentis a subjective task, even if it's widely agreed by most that TikTok and the CCP qualifies. Stating otherwise gives future governments the ability to censor other foreign governments where the question of hostility and propaganda are much more questionable. And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies. There is no such scarcity with the internet, hence why the FCC has no such jurisdiction over it.
There's only one way to get rid of TikTok, and that's to beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America. I don't care how difficult it is with breaking network effects. We have multiple world class social media companies that are up for the task. Put together a federal initiative to get them to all unite and build one patriotic, American made platform if you have to.
“Hostile government” is a term that is already defined in law. I don’t think it’s any more subjective than “right to bear arms” or “freedom of religion”.
But it's still subjective as to whom you apply that term to.
Only in the same sense that it’s subjective whether the top tax bracket pays 32% or 28%, and what income level the top tax bracket is calculated from. It gets specified by the law, and then it is objective what the law says.
Which makes it a relevant political question. I'm always open to the law and definitions of those countries change through the political process. But I think someone like Trump should have to make the argument that China is NOT a hostile government if he wants to make TikTok safe from this regulation. Mostly because I would enjoy his whole "Chyna" schtick in a speech that at the end had to declare why he thought we should remove them from the list of hostile governments.
However, after thinking about this for a little bit and reading the other comments I do think there is a better way.
First, I'd want to specifically target non-transparent moderation practices -- eg so a traditional news org where it's obviously selected by editors would be exempted.
But as I pointed out in a previous comment it's really hard to regulate this kind of content favoring syatem. So add a requirement that the group in charge of the algorithm for selecting content for display to Americans be based in the us employing us-persons who must issue some kind of transparency report indicating any kind of content they've choosen to delibrately disfavor.
I think the combination of the transparency report plus the requirement that it be done by us persons will handle both the concern that transparency could be evaded by a sufficently untrustworthy actor. And it's not a bad idea to apply it even to us companies and reduces the discretionary power of the state.
Right, but the usual idea is that the 1st amendment is supposed to take away legislative discretion regarding speech. And if this is valid it's not at all clear that they couldn't pass a law to do the same when the other government isn't hostile.
In particular, my concern is that in a growingly internationalized world pressure like this can be brought to bear selectively.
Let's consider Al-jazerra. Qatar is certainly in a kind of grey area where this kind of restriction could be justified on similar grounds but also could just not be applied and no one would bat an eye either. I'm quite concerned that this kind of precedent makes it relatively easier for Trump to pick up the phone and suggest to the people running al-jazerra america that he really doesn't appreciate the negative coverage -- and for that suggestion to suddenly have teeth behind it.
As is somewhat common for me in the SB comments, I find myself nodding along to both sides of the argument. To somewhat define the boundaries of your stance, do you think there's anything TikTok (or other platforms) could do that would make you agree with a forced sale/ban?
srynerson has laid out some ways in this thread in which a content neutral, viewpoint neutral law that happened to apply to TikTok, instead of targeting TikTok, could fly. I'd look at his posts for good descriptions on how that would work.
Thanks, appreciate it!
So, should we not have shut down Nazi propaganda efforts during WWII?
Many civil liberties are curtailed during war, justifiably so given the risks involved even if the results can be mixed. Just ask the Japanese-Americans who were interned in camps. Lincoln shut down Habeas during the Civil War.
But we are not at war with China.
And curtailing civil liberties even during war can be bad.
Are these examples used to say shutting down civil liberties during war is good?
"Many civil liberties are curtailed during war"
Suppose that congress were first to declare war on China (which they have the power to do) but then do nothing besides force the sale of TikTok. Would that be constitutional? Acceptable?
What if congress were first to declare war on *TikTok*? The constitution does not specify that war can only be declared against a country. (Heck, our last war was against an abstract concept --- granted congress did not declare it.)
MOSTLY JOKE EDIT: what if congress used its powers to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land" to let Elon Musk capture TikTok's US business and servers?
I feel that forcing the sale of TikTok should either be justified by the circumstances or it shouldn't. Its constitutionality shouldn't hinge on whether or not congress recites a magic war incantation before passing the law.
I feel like there'.s a very bizarro world situation where we've dubbed China one of or permanent most favored nations to trade with, and one where we totally think extreme life or death wartime measures are needed.
Like the only people enduring any pain here are American TikTok users aside from maybe some already rich successful executives. Like Apple's still free to make its iPhones in China and have policies that no show can criticize them, but like I want to talk about Songwriters without getting death threats and harassment that I get on American social media and that's the thing we can't allow because maybe hypothetically they could use that in some way.
Dude, respectfully...you are coming across as just another tiktok addict.
If it is that important to your life...you have a problem.
The relationship between China and the US (and the ‘west’ more generally) is indeed weird. From a national security front we treat them as an existential threat, yet there is also a massive amount of mutually beneficial trade between our economies. This is a totally different situation than was occurring during the Cold War with the Soviets.
It is very bizarre that TikTok gets all this flak while the other Chinese companies that do business in/with America do not.
I don’t think it’s all that bizarre. TikTok directly hits an intersection of issues that other companies do not: data privacy, social media + teens, national security, influencer culture, etc. There’s a lot of reasons people are skeptical of TikTok that end up bubbling up in this debate.
Most Chinese firms that do a lot of business with Americans aren't household names. Thus they're simply not very big targets. The several exceptions (TikTok, SHEIN, Temu) act as lightning rods.
Presumably the firmware and software is signed by Apple.
No, we should have called it out as propaganda, and fought that speech with our own speech. And I have no problem with stridently calling out TikTok on those grounds if the evidence increasingly points to them being propagandistic (and perhaps spyish, as well).
There's a difference between banning a platform and banning what can be said on a platform.
The platform is being banned for what it's saying.
Not exactly. It's being banned for being a tool of an authoritarian adversary. If people organically want to say things like Bin Laden was right (or whatever is currently being said on TikTok) on a western-owned platform, I'd be cool with it.
Again, defining an authoritarian adversary is subjective, even if there's wide agreement that the CCP should be defined as such. There will be cases where that definition is not as clear cut.
If we go to war with China, the US will and probably should ban lots of Chinese things. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
“beat them at their own game and build a better version of it here in America”
Unfortunately, “better” here really just means more addicting. I’m not a proponent of limiting free speech, but I also think it’s clear these apps are doing significant damage to the brains of the next generation. It would be good to stop China from putting its thumb on the scale to ensure their brains are rotted with pro-PRC and anti-American content. But I’m less sure that this is a problem for capitalism to solve.
If that's your take, then so be it, but it would be one that does not apply only to TikTok like the foreign propaganda take does.
I think is is very clear that TikTok is bad because of what it does to people’s brains, but it is especially bad because the owners want the negative effects and specifically to use the addictive properties to advance pro-PRC and anti-American propaganda.
"and let's get real, this is not merely requesting divestment--a ban has to be threatened to make the divestment request stick"
Why? The government has the power to take ownership of private property (in this case, TikTok's US assets) via the Takings Clause (they would just have to compensate TikTok) and then turn around and sell the seized assets. (Arguably like Kelo v. City of New London.)
Technically, TikTok can do everything they do without holding any US assets. A foreign entity can directly publish an App in the US App Stores. Many do.
True, but that can be changed without a free speech issue. E.g. the EU requiring data on European users to be hosted in Europe isn’t a free speech issue.
Clever, but I don't think that would fly if the goal of utilizing eminent domain is to change the platform's viewpoint.
What if the goal is to stop Chinese data collection?
Maybe? But Matt said "[t]he problem with TikTok is propaganda", and that's what I'm pushing back against.
> And Matt's CBS analogy from the 1970s doesn't hold up at all, because the FCC had authority then over genuinely scarce public airwaves that needed government stewardship to avoid broadcasters interfering with each other's frequencies.
I agree that's the principle used, but it's a fig leaf of an excuse. The sale of CBS wouldn't have been banned to prevent interference on people's antennas. There's certainly value in arguing forward from one's principles, wherever they lead. But arguing backwards from a desired outcome is also a time-honored tradition in American jurisprudence, and I don't see why it's beyond the pale here, especially when any benefit of not doing so is negligible.
Maybe I'm just becoming a pragmatist in my old age.
I think it's clear that my pragmatic read on this is different from several others here, which is that not allowing governments to shutter any publications they don't like ensures that they won't have that power to do it to publications less questionable than TikTok.
I think if TikTok were just a publication, most people wouldn't care. Maybe it's hyperbolic to claim that algorithmically delivered content in short video form is substantially more dangerous in its ability to shape people's minds, but I don't think it's completely crazy.
Regarding the risk of other outlets being banned someday, I don't think it's a real concern. I'm happy to take these one at a time.
"it's hyperbolic to claim that algorithmically delivered content in short video form is substantially more dangerous in its ability to shape people's minds, but I don't think it's completely crazy."
Except then you're effectively at Emma Goldman's, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal" dictum but for speech -- you have the right to read, listen, or watch whatever you want, just so long as it's ineffective at convincing you of anything we don't approve of.
Well, we don't let people living in foreign countries vote, nor do we let them buy ads for political candidates, so I think I'm still internally consistent.
The issue is not what you let people living in foreign countries do; the issue is what you let people living in the United States do.
The potential harm you’re discussing is moot. Instagram Reels exists. TikTok just has first-moved advantage. Were it banned, the exact same content would move to Reels, with more free speech because there would be no CCP censorship. QED.
I'm not sure that I would go for a total smartphone ban for under-18s, but I do think that a social media ban would be smart, and I think that smartphone/cell service providers should be required to offer phones and plans that can be locked into some kind of child mode that facilitates blocking of undesirable content and time-of-use restrictions.
There are some devices where the hardware itself is severely limited. I've seen some parents buy those for their kids, and I'm fine with parents making those decisions for their kids.
As someone who is on TikTok more then I would like and vicariously through my wife, the propaganda is very subtle but very effective.
The search about Uyghurs is a bit of a red herring, because no one uses TikTok's (terrible) search feature. TikTok's superpower is its algorithm, which is incredible. We joke that it is listening to our conversations, or maybe it's just untethered from some of the ethical restrictions that western companies put on the AI, but it is absolutely incredible at delivering exactly the content that you would enjoy. But it's not something that I may have expressed an interest in by likes, like mock-sad musical remixes about the anime Attack On Titan, but also on things that I never thought I would've liked but do (like videos of Maine fisherman cleaning barnacles off crabs).
All of that is to set up how good the algorithm is. And yet, both my wife and I were delivered many videos about the CEO of TikTok's testimony before congress, edited in ways to insinuate he was the victim of a McCarthyesque attack. There are other very subtle things the algorithm pushes on people, like Gen Zers talking about how Actually Osama Bin Laden Is Good. The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in.
This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in.
Except now you've basically reached Emma Goldman's, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal" dictum but for speech -- speech should only be free to the extent it's demonstrably ineffective at persuading people, but if it does actually influence people, we should lock that shit down tight!
Where did I say that?
I'll agree you didn't say that TikTok should be banned, but this statement is what I'm looking at:
"The algorithm delivers exactly what you want but then puts its fingers on the scale to slip things in. This is very different from banning Pravda or whatever. The problem with TikTok is how it is just pure entertainment, with propaganda subtly mixed in."
That was a reference to someone in the comment who was speaking about a proverbial ban of Pravda - not that I was saying Pravda shouldn't be banned and TikTok should.
I don't actually know whether TikTok should be banned (or a sale forced) - but I think it's important for people to have a sense how TiKTok propaganda actually works (it's not that the search function is limiting Uyghur results).
1. I think allowing the US government to ban speech it calls 'propaganda' is an extremely bad precedent. Living in a free society with a 1st Amendment is a good thing, actually
2. The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it
3. The other reason the natsec infrastructure laws argument doesn't work is that TikTok is an offshore company- their servers are physically located on mainland China. Americans point their web browsers or phones towards it. I agree China shouldn't own critical industries that are physically located on the continental US, but if they build a media platform hosted in Beijing that happens to be popular with Americans, what are you going to do about that? Assert that the US can nationalize or block any media platform located anywhere on planet Earth, that enough Americans happen to go to? Or, block Americans at the ISP level from visiting it?
4. Yes you could get them out of the app store, but TikTok could build a web interface just like how Facebook and Instagram have one. Again- are you going to literally block Americans from going to a website?
5. Are we nationalizing or blocking, say, the Russia Today news channel? Way more overt propaganda than TikTok, and definitely held by a real foreign adversary. How about Iranian newspapers? Venezuelan newspapers? Where does the censorship stop, exactly?
1. Yes which is why it is important to beat China like a drum so their speech norms don’t become the global paradigm.
3. & 4. Yes you ban them from the App Store. How many people use Instagram through Safari on their phones, and how much do they use it compared to if they had the app?
5. No but ideally we would nationalize Starlink.
re 1: "We have to suspend Americans' free speech rights, in order to beat the country that suppresses free speech rights". "We have to destroy the village in order to save it"
You could maybe ban them off the App Store (not sure if that's kosher or not), but what about all the people who already have the app installed on their phones? But to answer your question, yes, I think a ton of TikTok-addicted users would just visit their website
On your latter point, it's probably worth noting that YouTube became very popular even before the YouTube app was released.
Long form video is more often consumed on computers or TVs than on phones. And of course YouTube became quite popular before the smartphone was invented.
There's no reason, constitutionally speaking, why Starlink couldn't be nationalized by an act of Congress. You just have to pay Elon Musk fair market value for it, which nobody wants to do.
And then the USG would probably run it into the ground after the talent fled.
I want to! From https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/02/27/singh-nationalize-starlink/: "Ketamine habit aside, Elon Musk has a massive conflict of interest and cannot be trusted to put the national interest over his own bottom line. Uncle Sam can and should resolve this conflict by buying Starlink, for a fair price." (Please ignore that I used "interest" twice in the same sentence, I am aware that it reads a bit less well than it would otherwise.)
I'll rephrase: "which nobody who is not already steeped in the ways of Yglesias Thought wants to do."
I can not imagine why one would want to nationalize Starlink?
I'm familiar with multiple users of it who are quite happy with their commercial arrangement with Starlink.
Starlink has crossed many new lines success-wise as to bandwidth, capacity, low latency, etc. Those make it extremely capable and valuable, but a global satellite network for communication is not new territory. What is the rationale by which one would seek to nationalize Starlink, which is an inherently international service offering coincidentally.
Starlink is important for US defense policy and Elon Musk has enormous business interests in China: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/02/27/singh-nationalize-starlink/
Starlink is a new development. The US DoD has and has had their own satellite communications assets and networks for quite some time now. Nothing mission critical should be riding the Starlink constellation.
Starlink is also due to have competitors, though I have doubts about them, given their slow progress.
China has asked Starlink not to sell services in Chinese territory, which is their right - they have an uncontested right to grant or deny the terrestrial transmitter side. They would decline to grant regardless of who owns the network.
Taiwan is not Chinese territory
"The reason the Soviet Union/CBS analogy doesn't work is that China built TikTok and didn't acquire it"
Why does this distinction matter? The soviet union should have been allowed to start their own US-based TV network but shouldn't have been allowed to buy one?
The USSR wouldn't have been allowed to start a broadcast network in 1975 for the same reason it couldn't buy CBS in 1975 -- FCC regulations that specifically applied to over-the-air broadcasting, but which have no applicability to the internet.
So the distinction doesn’t matter.
I unfortunately have too much work to do today to write a comprehensive response, but a lot of other folks are doing a good job on addressing key points, so I'll limit myself to a meta viewpoint on the whole thing:
This is truly a subject where Matt's general attitude of, "LOL, who cares what the courts have said, we'll figure out the specifics later," doesn't work because "The Law" and "The Policy" are completely inseparable in this context. It is not an exaggeration to say that the First Amendment is literally the most absolute part of American constitutional law. Unlike the Commerce Clause, which there are a million ways to engineer around, SCOTUS has spent the last century eradicating virtually every "One Weird Trick to Regulate Speech" that federal, state, and local government officials have devoted their efforts to coming up with outside of some very specific contexts (e.g., the broadcast regulations that make Matt's 1975 CBS example irrelevant) and SCOTUS has put a lot of effort in the last few decades to spelling out that those specific contexts are, indeed *specific*, and that it isn't looking to expand them.
You can say that those decisions by SCOTUS should be *overturned* (any level of government is free to try to do something unconstitutional and then convince the courts to overturn past precedents), but you should be honest about what you are advocating for.
I think that Matt—like a lot of fairly smart people— sometimes incorrectly makes the jump from the (correct) observation that law is basically Calvinball (rulers can in fact get away with making any decision that their subordinates are willing to enforce, and the Supreme Court can, in fact technically come to whatever conclusion it wants) to the conclusion that the courts, the civil service, or both will actually be willing to act like the law is Calvinball outside of some fairly particular and extreme circumstances.
There actually is some fairly strong consensus that courts should try to act in accordance with consistent principles and that officials should respect the courts’ conclusions. I admit that I was personally surprised by how strong the commitment is— I had to spend a couple years watching the (sometimes surprising and counterintuitive) effects of litigation on publicly traded companies and have some deep and serious conversations with lawyer friends before I really got it.
100%
Taking this present reality one step further, I submit that we should all absolutely WANT the stability and consistency of principles in our courts' conclusions.
Yeah, I think that there are some cases where violating the norms out the window is the correct thing to do from a consequentialist perspective, but the cost is real, and high— it’s the sort of thing you should only do rarely, and when the stakes are really important.
As I've commented elsewhere here, people are free to propose things that violate present interpretations of the Constitution and to then try to convince SCOTUS to change its interpretation, but they should be honest that's what their proposal involves.
I hadn't heard of the idea of a progressive tax on digital ads as a way to incentivize social media diversification. I actually think that is a really good idea.
I don't think it works, in practice, unless you're using the revenue specifically to subsidize the creation, expansion, and perhaps even operating budgets of competing platforms.
In reality, the two biggest factors in an online advertising marketplace are total consumer reach -- how many people in the target audience are regularly interacting -- and technology/data support for matching advertiser/product/service interest with customer interest.
Even if the best marketplaces are the giants and are paying a larger tax, they'll take the cut to margin to keep the eyeballs and advertisers.
I think that is true if the tax rates are old mildly progressive but if there is a stark tax difference for a small revenue vs large, it might help some smaller regional services compete.
Guys, let me put it in terms you'll all understand: if you let them ban TikTok, next they'll require age verification on porn sites. Don't forget that MindGeek is a Canadian company!
I believe Matt is in favor of that. I’m not exactly sure how I feel.
I know - I'm trying to make a joke. I'm in favor of a TikTok ban and against age verification laws. It's motivated reasoning all the way down!
Requiring age verification, which in practice means identity verification & recording because the site is going to want to be able to maintain an evidence file of best effort compliance for the inevitable bad faith attempts to undermine the verification scheme that comes after such schemes are enacted, inherently limits the reach and accessibility of material for and to marginalized communities. It has no place in a free speech society.
The protection of children is crucial and the way to protect one's children from bad things on the internet is to the use quite strong platform level protections in the device your child uses to restrict what they have access to and under what circumstances.
I would like to see more in depth reporting on the underlying legal questions and authorities surrounding the TikTok matter.
For instance, the rule against foreign broadcast network and broadcast station ownership is based upon two distinct factors to avoid 1st amendment bars - 1) broadcast television spectrum is inherently limited in capacity and must be utilized so as to maximize benefit of a scare resource for the general public. (This same theory is what underpins the no adult content, no vulgar language, etc. during kid friendly hours.) 2) these examples involve foreign investment into domestic companies and resources, which we can definitely restrict as a matter of commerce policy.
The TikTok issue is different. If it fully divested of US operations, it could remain a foreign entity entirely with its app still available in the US Apple & Google stores. I believe US citizens have a 1st amendment right to any published content they wish to access, including explicitly foreign propaganda. Is there actually a law that says I can't phone up a CCP office and ask to subscribe to their newsletter? Does the 1st amendment contemplate a mechanism for the US government to interfere should I do so?
When has a social media platform ever been sold and it worked out okay for the existing community. The only big examples I can think of were disastrous or tiny. I picture tt divestment going about as well as Tumblr’s adult content ban which it never was really the same fun place afterwards where you could have cool erotic art next to someone’s queer breakup story and a book review.
Are we just going to say like no fun things from China ever even though they seem to be where all the new entertainment will be coming from on a because we say so basis? Tencent owns a huge proportion of the other thing I’m likely to do if I’m not on TikTok which is play video games. Like what standards and are we forcing people to give up their work by and for? I’m really uncomfortable with your life as an American must get worse on an arbitrary we say so basis.
1. Most of the time when a social media platform is sold people don't really notice in a negative way (YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc).
2. Yes no fun things from China as long as those things are controlled by an evil authoritarian dictatorship
I object to implying YouTube did not in fact go to shit after Google's acquisition.
Was it the sale that caused this, or did the sale just trigger the inevitable switch from startup “burn-money-to-grow-at-all-costs” to needing to make the business financially beneficial
Maybe old YouTube would have developed the capacity to switch from good video host to algorithmically boosted shitshow without Google, but it surely would have taken a lot longer.
I’ve heard very little about pre-Google YouTube. Was it more like Vimeo?
Main thing I remember being personally mad about is that it used to be, that if you had a crappy connection, you could just pause the video and let it buffer the whole thing so you could actually watch with decent quality. Big deal in the dark ages of 2008 or whenever that was.
Not joking when I say that I miss being able to buffer things!
I believe it was 2005 actually. I think it was already owned by Google when Lazy Sunday went viral. (Edit: apparently Lazy Sunday went viral in late 2005, but it was bought by Google in late 2006.)
I do remember that constant “buffering” thing. I don’t specifically remember the ability to buffer a whole video changing when ownership changed, but that does sound plausible.
So when China does bad things we should punish Americans with shitty trash like the reels community.
I also should add in as an edit here that most of these sales took place as a friendly effort between a small company and a big company to provide scale. This would be explicitly to change things about the product and give liscense to harm existing communities. I suspect it would look more like Tumblr than instagram.
Part of the reason the Reels community sucks is that TikTok takes up all the oxygen.
I think there’s a level of truth to that but I also think there’s a bunch of problems that stem from Facebook’s choices. And the big one is unfixable that they associated most accounts back to Facebook and it’s highly tied with the friends and family network there, YT has the same problem but it’s business contacts. And even if they reversed course it’s water under the bridge at present.
These are a huge liability.
"I’m really uncomfortable with your life as an American must get worse on an arbitrary we say so basis."
Welcome to living in a society, man. Sometimes government shafts you for the greater good.
I dispute that they’ve established a prima faciae case that this is for the greater good. You couldn’t win a high school debate with the proposition that Chinese control of TikTok has directly harmed Americans. There’s some evidence of propaganda but since when is arbitrary censorship of an online discussion harm?
The same institutions that have maliciously lied to Americans repeatedly for decades and never met a war they didn’t want.
Umm instagram for one
China blocks its citizens' access to foreign media. Is that what we want to emulate? I should have the right to read, watch, listen to anything I want and judge for myself, even if it's state propaganda.
The "Soviets buying CBS" analogy doesn't hold - broadcasting never had full 1A protection due to the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum - a rationale that technology has made obsolete. (Confession: when I was a kid I sometimes listened to foreign broadcasts, including Radio Moscow - should the government have banned those inexpensive Radio Shack shortwave receivers?)