Comment by arlattimore 4 hours ago
I’m not sure what order things go in, but I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos Those people publishing to TikTok were probably on Instagram and if they weren’t, they will be now if they want to reach the same American audience.
However forcing TikTok to divest of foreign ownership is not restricting the rights of Americans to express their opinions. Americans are free to widely exercise their first amendment rights- the TikTok order to divest foreign ownership doesn’t affect those users ability to speak. The first amendment does not guarantee you access to a specific platform- it means that the bar for the government to imprison you for speech is very high (you can be held in contempt for lying under oath, for example)
I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.
I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....
And now unconfirmed reports that RedNote is considering segregating the new American users from the Chinese users, ironically so Americans couldn’t influence Chinese users - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
I would disagree, the first amendment in fact does protect platforms for speech. If the government tried to ban the New York Times through an act of Congress, the Supreme Court would strike that down.
In this case, the fact that the platform is foreign and that the foreign owner is considered hostile to the US carves out an exception.
Banning foreign ownership of broadcast media companies is not new. It’s just that the laws have lagged the shift from broadcast linear mediums to the internet.
Source: the FCC specifically prohibits certain ownership of broadcast stations by foreign entities:
“Section 310(a) prohibits a foreign government or its representative from holding any radio license.
Section 310(b)(3) prohibits foreign individuals, governments, and corporations from owning more than twenty percent of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical radio station licensee.”
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
TikTok is used for far more than cat videos which is why it's a considered a threat to those in power. There are freely flowing ideas and narratives which they cannot control - except now they are by restricting access to it.
Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearing. People without community are easier to control.
Why shouldn’t TikTok just divest, then? Bytedance could make a huge amount of money by selling TikTok. And then that huge influx of money could keep TikTok operating forever. The fact that they’d rather shut down is pretty telling.
> I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos
You'd be wrong.
What value would a concept like the First Amendment have if it were voidable as easily as "we have national security concerns" or "the information on there isn't valuable." Given that those are pretty much the immediate go-to excuses for any autocrats clamp down on speech, such a right would be totally meaningless.