Comment by ericmay

Comment by ericmay 10 hours ago

26 replies

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Sure but what would that have to do with this action here?

TikTok isn’t being banned because of free speech or not but because the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues. China has recognized this as a threat and as such has banned foreign adversary social media companies from operating within its borders.

Likewise the United States has recognized that this is a serious threat as well and has sought to do the same.

Both countries claim to want to defend their systems of governments so it stands to reason they are just taking reciprocal actions here.

The “free speech” angle is just Chinese propaganda. We stop businesses from operating in the United States all the time and sanction companies and stop them from doing business within our financial network all the time. TikTok is just some random company and we can stop it from doing business here. Free speech isn’t a meaningful discussion point here.

ch4s3 10 hours ago

The US also has an enshrined freedom of association, and I personally believe the association rights of those users is being violated.

Moreover it seems like security theater.

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  • ericmay 9 hours ago

    No we don't - and we stop free associations all the time. I can't call up my non-existent buddies in Russia and say hey you guys need weapons? Well I'll sell them to you. We ban NVIDIA from selling advanced chips to China or North Korea. We prohibit US citizens from bribing officials in countries like Mexico for permits.

    > Moreover it seems like security theater.

    Meh. At a minimum it's just an economic reciprocation. If China doesn't allow our wildly successful social media companies to operate in China, we can as a matter of trade decide to stop their wildly successful social media company from operating in our country.

    Reply View 5 replies
    • ch4s3 6 hours ago

      You can call them up and just chat or go have tea with them. The crime there is evading a weapons sanction. Controlling weapons sales isn’t an infringement on 1a association rights.

      That’s a stupid trade policy.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • ericmay 6 hours ago

        What are First Amendment Association rights?

        Reply View 3 replies
throw310822 8 hours ago

> the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues.

Which, if true, means that the US has been influencing the rest of the world for the past 20 years through all the other social networks.

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kalleboo 5 hours ago

At least I hope this drives the EU to ban the use of X in their territory for the same reasons as the TikTok ban in the US. The owner is part of the incoming regime, and has been explicit about wanting to influence European elections.

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  • bdangubic 5 hours ago

    this is exactly what should happen if EU had the balls

    Reply View 2 replies
tveita 6 hours ago

> the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues.

Yes, speech does that. "The algorithm" is curation but the content we are talking about is mostly Americans talking to other Americans. The goal is to control and suppress that communication.

There are perfectly valid arguments to ban TikTok. And hey, there are arguments to be made that free speech shouldn't be absolute. But that doesn't fit into the American self image, so the argument must be obscured to reduce the dissonance. Your argument in particular maps perfectly to "Some kinds of speech are dangerous and people must be protected from them."

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  • ericmay 5 hours ago

    My argument (mostly) is that TikTok is just a random company that we permitted to do business in the United States and we can revoke that permission at any time as it suits our needs and laws. TikTok sells advertisements and people talk about those advertisements. That's all it does.

    Whether people share memes or communicate American to American isn't material. We know this is true because a company with the same features and products can be shut down if it's discovered that the same company engaged in other illegal activities (let's say money laundering or human trafficking to make it clear) and so someone's First Amendment rights would be abridged by the shut down of the company.

    TikTok is just in the same scenario and has now found itself afoul of US laws and regulations and has to adjust by selling itself or it can exit the market.

    The other thing here is that you'd have to convincingly argue that people who have never used TikTok (me for example) have now had their First Amendment rights violated, but there has been no change in my First Amendment rights. I can still use my freedom of speech as I could before.

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crummy 10 hours ago

> but because the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues

Is that the case or is that just assumed what the government means when they say issues of national security? I thought they meant our devices could be hacked by malicious code in TikTok apps.

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keybored 8 hours ago

> TikTok isn’t being banned because of free speech or not but because the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues. China has recognized this as a threat and as such has banned foreign adversary social media companies from operating within its borders.

The “personal freedom” part would be most immediately salient here.

Free speech wouldn’t apply if the app wasn’t in use already. But so many millions of Americans use the app already that it easily is about free speech as well.

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  • redwall_hp 7 hours ago

    I can't get over how widely accepted this paternalistic thinking is. "People might be viewing and think in the wrong things and must be stopped!" It's textbook censorship, with a bunch of legal tap dancing to attempt to justify it against the obvious unconstitutionality.

    We can hardly claim to have a democracy while acting like the population at large needs to be controlled in such a way. It's contradictory.

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    • corimaith 2 hours ago

      If you want politically contrarian content you can just go to /pol/ or numerous internet forums discussing global events and politics. Hell, Wikipedia would be sufficient, and if you are serious you would be reading academic papers and studies, not social media.

      The fact that these people don't want to do that, and would rather rely upon walled gardens and algorithms to feed them short-form content to inform their opinions already implies a desire for paternalism in of itself. You look at some these people talking about they were "lied" to about how China is third-world dump (where did they get that idea?) and in fact it's bustling cities with skyscrapers, when there are plenty of youtube videos showing the modern Chinese cities since it's inception.

      When they didn't try to verify their assumptions with a trivial 2 minute search should tell you that these people want to be propagandized and will always be propagandized. Whether it's American Propaganda or Chinese Propaganda or whatever, they aren't ever going to take the responsiblity to actually to challenge their own preconceptions, they'll just sway from one extreme of propaganda to the next.

      These people, by rejecting the old internet and choosing walled gardens, they want to be treated paternalistically. That's why they'll always reference other walled gardens like Facebook or Instagram, they'll never reference older forums or image boards. And so if we don't take that role, well the CCP would be quite content to fill in.

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    • ericmay 7 hours ago

      As a society we just get to decide that. We can simultaneously be a democracy and also prohibit people from doing things. We can even be hypocritical. It's great!

      There's nothing contradictory about it because living in a democratic society doesn't mean that you have free reign to do anything that you want.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • scarecrowbob 4 hours ago

        Hell, yall can put people in concentration camps, enslave folks, summarily execute them.

        It's great. /s

        Look: I live next to a reservation, where the US gov committed war crimes. There's a fort up the hill a quarter mile up from where I am, which was a "residential school" where the US gov put kidnapped children to "educate them".

        You are 100% right that democracy can coexist with all manner of depravity.

        We get it, yall can happily do enact horrors you feel like enacting on the rest of us and still enjoy feeling smug that we don't like it.

        But that fact means that something being "democratic" does not mean that we should respect what you do just because you have a veneer of democracy across it.

        I am profoundly grateful I have so many greater crimes commited by the US to contextualize what, in the big scheme of things, is a meaningless and goofy action. If I didn't know that they were spearheading the literal ecocide of the planet while incarcerating more people than have every been locked up, while simultaniously funding a genocide in Israel, I'd probably feel like this is some kind of espeically bad thing.

        But it's not; it barely even registers once you start looking at the millions of people that the US has directly murdered in the last 250 years.

        But It's Great! (tm)

        Reply View 1 reply
        • ericmay 3 hours ago

          I know I know.

          Americans... sorry I meant United Statesians, are really bad people. We might even be the worst people on the planet by any conceivable measure.

          Since we're so bad and we've murdered so many millions of people, I guess there's no redeeming us and anything good we've ever done was meaningless so I say we go ahead and ban TikTok as our final coup de grâce in this terrible and twisted timeline.

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  • ericmay 6 hours ago

    The problem with this argument is that you are putting TikTok on a pedestal.

    The US (and every country on the planet) has rules and regulations around who can do business in their country and who their citizens may do business with.

    If you want to argue that the U.S. shouldn't be able to prohibit its citizens from doing business with TikTok you should spend some time generalizing that argument and figuring out a good reason we shouldn't be able to prohibit Americans from selling weapons to Russia, or allowing Russian companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States to build weapons to send back to Russia. (or any other scenario you want to make up)

    "Free speech" is not a good argument here. TikTok isn't a "free speech" platform. It's just a random company selling products and services in the United States.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • dragonwriter 5 hours ago

      > "Free speech" is not a good argument here. TikTok isn't a "free speech" platform.

      Free speech doesn't protect free speech platforms: free speech protects every speaker, platform, and listener against regulations targeted on the basis of content/viewpoint.

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      • ericmay 5 hours ago

        Yep and you are still protected under the 1st Amendment even if you can't use TikTok because the government stopped the company from doing business in America.

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      • dialup_sounds 4 hours ago

        Three branches of government agree that this is not regulation targeted on the basis of content or viewpoint.

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