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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-preparing-us-shut-off-sunday-information-reports-2025-01-15/
There is a relevant in that first sentence. Let's try it out with different subjects and objects to see if we would call that a ban:
The law signed in April mandates a ban on liquor sales at Total Wine if bottles are not labeled.
The law signed in April mandates a ban on Toyota produced in Japanese-owned factories rather than American-owned factories.
The law signed in April mandates a ban on cheeses if the milk is not sourced from FDA-inspected farms.
I would not describe these as "bans". They impose requirements (divestment from ownership by an adversarial government in this case). Perhaps they're bad regulations, but they aren't bans on the products in question. That ByteDance is apparently going to elect to sunset the application rather than take the money and run is strongly suggestive of the real value being non-monetary advantages to the Chinese government.
TikTok, as it exists today, is getting banned. You can call it an attempted expropriation if you want.
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What of intent?
If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.
I disagree, because singling out one business like that with no justification is illegal in the American system.
You have to make tortuous arguments to meet a predicate that allows you to do what you ultimately wanted to do. In this case national security.
The question then is: according to their own statements, is it likely that the justification offered by American politician in this case is in good faith?
I don't really care on free speech grounds personally, but if you want to argue it you have to address TikTok's own argument, which is that this ban is in bad faith.
This would be a lot more convincing if the US didn't just complain about Georgian laws that prevent foreign funding of NGOs.
So it's quite easy to formulate the argument, you just take the official position of the US on Georgian NGO regulation and swap some words.
In principle I'd be ready to agree for both cases that "this is what countries do sometimes". But I have the moral luxury of believing in free speech as a natural right, so I don't really give a shit that exposing people to foreign propaganda is inconvenient for national security. I have a right to see what the other side publishes, and that extends as much to Russian newspapers as it does Chinese brainrot apps.
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It isn't singling out a business, it's singling out an owner.
How do you feel about a hypothetical law that would ban any press publication that is owned by a Chinese person?
Singling out an owner doesn't make it automatically good, it makes it good on a case by case basis, and the Chinese person wouldn't qualify.
Then why bring up a factor that isn't relevant to the distinction? What's the factor that makes it good, actually?
I mean besides that it helps your friends and hurts your enemies.
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PAFACA does expressly name ByteDance and TikTok but they're given as examples in its purpose, which is banning social media platforms owned by foreign adversaries such as the CCP. The Commerce Clause gives Congress plenary authority to regulate foreign trade and that's original intent, it's also a fundamental power of all sovereigns. Banning any foreign social media is nothing more than an embargo, and embargoes are intrinsically legitimate exercises of constitutional and sovereign authority.
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China has long banned foreign social media companies from operating in its borders, and in 2021 passed severe restrictions on companies taking data on Chinese citizens outside its jurisdiction. If TikTok were willing to keep its US data in a US subsidiary that operated entirely domestically by employees under US jurisdiction, we'd be having a different conversation, I think. IIRC Facebook et al already have to keep EU data within the EU too under GDPR.
America has long advertised itself to the world on the basis of being fundamentally, philosophically not-China.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” doesn’t work here because precisely by imitating the controls that China puts on what its citizens can access, America is saying that it does not believe its citizens can be trusted to make right choices for themselves and their country.
Put another way, “nobody’s making them download Chinese propaganda/spyware” might be groan worthy naïveté but considering that to be naïveté rather than nobility strikes at the heart of what I would consider the American project.
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Does this argument work for other forms of tyranny that exist in Europe and China already?
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