Comment by WarOnPrivacy 3 hours ago
> These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature
The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action.
Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.
You're presuming that these are communication platforms. I argue that they aren't—to the extent that they are useful for communication it's a pure coincidence, not a design choice.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
The state is under no obligation to allow known foreign propagandists attached to a known communist party to engage in activities well outside the protections of the first amendment.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.