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To be clear: no one is banning tiktok. They may force ByteDance to divest from the American form of tiktok. ByteDance can then sell it to non-Chinese owners. Or take their ball and go home. Their choice.
The arguments I've heard in favor of this involve the CCP controlling Chinese companies and the American form of tiktok being a horrible antisocial negative version but the Chinese version being a prosocial positive version. Which would be the CCP messing with our youth. And the black box hand-modified algorithm promoting content is not an even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity. Neither in China nor the US.
Anecdotally my Chinese American in-laws and wife agree that the Chinese version of tiktok is superior. And they use Chinese mainland Apple accounts to load it on their phones because it is the "good" version. So when some Congressman claims that, I accept it.
To be clear, the bills that are supposed to 'ban tiktok' would also enable regulation of any other media simply by claiming that managers or owners of said media are 'rival influenced'. So you could go after Twitter e.g. because Musk posted unflattering claims about Ukrainian war and the only reason for that is that he's Russian influenced. The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.
You'd only be able to challenge this law in a specific D.C. Court. Good luck!
I really doubt that is what 'rival influenced' means. "We sold it to one of our other subsidiaries or partners, so it isn't us technically doing it" has to be banned for this to be sensible.
Not to mention going after Twitter for foreign policy views is a glaring 1st Ammendment issue. I think this is a fantasy.
Haven't you been paying attention, at all, to what the state is doing? E.g. the Biden laptop suppressed using national security excuse, which turned out to be a lie.
The end run over 1st amendment by making their proxies in Brussels pass a law that'd require censorship of global networks and set the default. etc.
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Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:
And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:
It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.
If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.
The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.
The concerning part is that the president can make a private classified notice that someone is a foreign adversary that only congress gets to see and then FBI/CIA/Secret Service action can be taken against the corporation without anyone know that its 'legalized' by this bill and by the private notice to congress.
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Reminder that they stole $500 million from Trump for the crime of possibly exaggerating the value of his Florida club, which they valued at $18 million dubiously and then turned around and declared that the club if seized is suddenly worth hundreds of millions for the purpose of paying off the fine.
Direction and control seems extremely broad statements, so unless you can provide some legal definition for that, it's rather sinister..
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
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Why does this remind me of a completely other unrelated bill during 9/11 that allows for student loan forgiveness basically referring to 9/11 related stuff but 20+ years later was used for student loan forgiveness on things not like 9/11.
I don’t even want to blame congress for this because I think writing laws is hard when you want them to do one thing specifically but have some flexibility so congress doesn’t need to write a new law every time $5k is spent.
The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.
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Interesting to hear your family's experience. Isn't it the case that Chinese tiktok is superior because the government leans heavily on them to remove dopamine sinks and encourage prosocial behaviour? If anything, perhaps we should be outsourcing moderation to China across the board.
More seriously, there is an inherent tension between wanting a "prosocial positive" tiktok, and an "even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity". That's the case for all social media whether American or Chinese-owned. Either (1) you prevent people from seeing antisocial content that they might enjoy or (2) you allow people to view that content and risk wireheading them or (3) we live in the best of all possible worlds and people naturally choose prosocial content where possible.
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I generally agree with people that describe "Do X, or else we'll do Y" as "plans/threats to do Y". In this case, I have zero problem describing "divest from the app, or else it will be banned" as "...planning to ban tiktok".
It would be like arguing "the mobster isn't threatening to break your kneecaps. You can pay back your debts, or else... It's entirely your choice."
Argument by analogy is always flawed. So of course your analogy is not relevant to the matter at hand.
No Chinese company has a right to own anything in the US. They have previously been forced to divest or blocked from purchasing things in the US. I do not accept TicTok refusing to sell a subsidiary to non-Chinese owners as a ban. If they'd rather shut it down than divest, that is entirely on them. In every way unlike a mobster giving me the choice to pay him or to have him cripple me.
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