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?)
Giving TikTok the choice of selling to an US entity or being banned from the US is effectively stealing a Chinese innovation, copying their technology and implementing our own version of it, which is something that we constantly criticize China for doing.
TikTok started out as an app where people could make short videos of themselves lip-syncing to songs. It was then colonized by young people before more-or-less stumbling onto the idea that its appeal was that it surfaced short, (seemingly) random videos rather than emphasizing social graphs. It then pivoted to basically a combination of Vine and StumbleUpon that utilized modern data science to surface engaging, but still random-seeming content.
That sounds exactly like every Silicon Valley success story ever; a bad idea that brought together a group of smart people who ended up finding their way to a good idea. Zuckerberg even stole their idea and tried to leverage the Facebook user base to put them out of business. But because this time it is owned by a Chinese company, suddenly their motives and methods to creating a successful and popular app are nefarious and unfair?
We have laws that keep components out of critical infrastructure that could pose a national security threat (e.g., Huawei and 5G). Those laws make a lot of sense. And it also makes sense that we have laws that curtail the ability of foreign governments to spread propaganda, so we should write/update those laws to address the TikTok situation. But that is not what is happening here. Instead, politicians are falling over each other to demagogue China and be the most Helen Lovejoy. And the proposed solutions all seem to lead to the outcome that they can fund-raise by dragging an American tech CEO in front of Congress to dodge dumb questions about censorship and bias after every election.
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?)
Giving TikTok the choice of selling to an US entity or being banned from the US is effectively stealing a Chinese innovation, copying their technology and implementing our own version of it, which is something that we constantly criticize China for doing.
TikTok started out as an app where people could make short videos of themselves lip-syncing to songs. It was then colonized by young people before more-or-less stumbling onto the idea that its appeal was that it surfaced short, (seemingly) random videos rather than emphasizing social graphs. It then pivoted to basically a combination of Vine and StumbleUpon that utilized modern data science to surface engaging, but still random-seeming content.
That sounds exactly like every Silicon Valley success story ever; a bad idea that brought together a group of smart people who ended up finding their way to a good idea. Zuckerberg even stole their idea and tried to leverage the Facebook user base to put them out of business. But because this time it is owned by a Chinese company, suddenly their motives and methods to creating a successful and popular app are nefarious and unfair?
We have laws that keep components out of critical infrastructure that could pose a national security threat (e.g., Huawei and 5G). Those laws make a lot of sense. And it also makes sense that we have laws that curtail the ability of foreign governments to spread propaganda, so we should write/update those laws to address the TikTok situation. But that is not what is happening here. Instead, politicians are falling over each other to demagogue China and be the most Helen Lovejoy. And the proposed solutions all seem to lead to the outcome that they can fund-raise by dragging an American tech CEO in front of Congress to dodge dumb questions about censorship and bias after every election.