It's clearly a response to people getting unfiltered news from Tiktok that it otherwise not presented on mainstream media at all. It's why the ban was in the defense spending bill last week. Even outside the current Middle East conflict, the Ohio rderailment last year was extensively covered on Tiktok for 1-2 weeks before it really got any mainstream coverage.
The data privacy issue is a lie because Congress could've passed a comprehensive data privacy bill but didn't (and won't).
But the more compelling argument, and why I'm torn, is reciprocity of access to the Chinese market. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, etc are actually or effectively banned in mainland China. China's entry into the WTO sort of allows this and I understand why China does it but if the US took the position that access to the US market requires reciprocal access to the other country's market, that would be a position hard to argue against. I'm surprised that wasn't the argument made.
Tech giants have been very effective at arguing the "algorithm" decides what's shown to users and what isn't but the algorithm is merely a vessel for human decisions on what is a feature, what is ranked, etc. Facebook and IG manipulate their ranking too but they do it in a way compatible with US government policy so it isn't an issue. That's the real problem with Tiktok, as far as Congress is concerned.
> It's clearly a response to people getting unfiltered news from Tiktok that it otherwise not presented on mainstream media at all. It's why the ban was in the defense spending bill last week.
These kinds of unrelated laws attached to bills that are likely to pass are called "riders", and they've been used since the early days of Congress. Attaching the TikTok rider to the defense spending bill doesn't necessarily mean that Congress sees it as related to national defense, just that the leaders saw it more likely to easily pass when attached to a defense bill.
Also, I'm positive that I heard about the Ohio derailment on Reddit before mainstream media coverage, and there's no way it wasn't on Twitter either. But those companies aren't targeted in this ban because they aren't owned by foreign adversaries.
I don't really see either of those as factors or at least not major factors. China is entirely comfortable playing a long game they take a long view with nearly everything they do. It is at least plausible that they want to be able to influence a major voting bloc and they're fine if they have to start with kids and wait for them to grown to voters.
Consider how small the effort was in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. How little effort Russia, allegedly, had to put into whatever happened the outsized effect. Even if that didn't change any specific election, and that's debatable, it's clear that a larger more organized effort could.
Why would any country allow any foreign actor have that kind of control over its voters?
Each country needs to weigh the risks of letting a foreign power like those companies control so much of their information access, against the benefit of the services they provide. Of course the United States wants United States companies in every country so the US government isn't going to pass a law prohibiting this out of some odd sense of propriety or altruism. And some countries are likely going to decide wrong in both directions.
wouldn't affect me whether or not they operated at all, but those legal persons do have rights in this country. i couldn't say for anywhere else (nor would that affect me either).
This is an argument that is too complex to be wrap into the ban of a single company.
For instance the US car market has incentives helping cars under some specific conditions that conveniently put all foreign cars and truck at a disadvantage, if there's not an outright "built in the US" specification on it [0]. And China will have other indirect ways to protect specific markets (denying IP protection basically kills some industry sectors for instance). Then the US will raise tariffs, and China put other barriers etc.
Reciprocity is a moral assessment, international trade is just way too complicated for that IMHO.
On TikTok specifically, the US gov seeking control over a foreign asset is probably not a about following policies or not. Otherwise asking for an ownership change makes no sense: imagine a court deciding that FTX didn't follow banking policies so another entity buying it within a year is the solution. No, in these cases the problematic entity is disolved and people go to jail.
> This is an argument that is too complex to be wrap into the ban of a single company.
I disagree. There are several considerations here:
1. Free speech: a ban on a specific company is going to be challenged on First Amendment grounds. ByteDance has a plausible case here. The bar for government restriction on speech is necessarily high.
This raises the question of whether Congress actually wants this to pass or is this performative? That's an unanswered question. But a serious effort to clamp down on Tiktok in particular or supposed foreign control of speech in general would try to avoid 1A challenges.
2. To sell this to voters, putting it in terms of "I can't sell cars in China so we don't allow Chinese cars in the US" is easy to understand and it appeals to the innate sense of "fairness".
3. The reciprocity argument also falls outside of Free Speech issues. It's commerce not free speech, which courts are way more responsive to, even in cases where courts should see a 1S issue (eg various state laws banning anti-BDS movements).
> Reciprocity is a moral assessment, international trade is just way too complicated for that IMHO.
It's not. It's a core part of trade agreements, so much so that China needed a special dispensation in their WTO entry to avoid reciprocity requirements.
> ... the US gov seeking control over a foreign asset is probably not a about following policies or not.
Sure, it is. Meta or Twitter aren't under scrutiny. There's no effort around data privacy or how the algorithm works. Meta has gotten in trouble a few times for policy issues: eg racial discrimination in housing ads and allowing the import of drugs from Canada.
> imagine a court deciding that FTX didn't follow banking policies so another entity buying it within a year is the solution.
I don't have to imagine it. The FDIC takes over banks all the time.
> I disagree. There are several considerations here [...]
Sorry for the poor wording, I was referring to China/US reciprocity being a more complicated issue than whether TikTok can be banned or not. The former will never be resolved, while the latter will just be a court case.
> It's not. It's a core part of trade agreements, so much so that China needed a special dispensation in their WTO entry to avoid reciprocity requirements.
I was mistaken about what reciprocity represents, and you're right, it is a core part of trade agreements, and a term of art meaning something more precise than the general understanding of it. TIL.
But I couldn't find anything related to reciprocity regarding the entry of China to the WTO [0]. Even going through the report [1] it's just about China needing to open it's economy and accept foreign investment, including reworking it's IP laws and other pretty deep changes.
Information abuse definitely needs laws, but it needs to skirt around free speech. And I always support free speech, but when I see videos marketing harm toward people it stops becoming something you say.
It's clearly a response to people getting unfiltered news from Tiktok that it otherwise not presented on mainstream media at all. It's why the ban was in the defense spending bill last week. Even outside the current Middle East conflict, the Ohio rderailment last year was extensively covered on Tiktok for 1-2 weeks before it really got any mainstream coverage.
The data privacy issue is a lie because Congress could've passed a comprehensive data privacy bill but didn't (and won't).
But the more compelling argument, and why I'm torn, is reciprocity of access to the Chinese market. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, etc are actually or effectively banned in mainland China. China's entry into the WTO sort of allows this and I understand why China does it but if the US took the position that access to the US market requires reciprocal access to the other country's market, that would be a position hard to argue against. I'm surprised that wasn't the argument made.
Tech giants have been very effective at arguing the "algorithm" decides what's shown to users and what isn't but the algorithm is merely a vessel for human decisions on what is a feature, what is ranked, etc. Facebook and IG manipulate their ranking too but they do it in a way compatible with US government policy so it isn't an issue. That's the real problem with Tiktok, as far as Congress is concerned.