It’s totally insane that China can ban all American social networks on security concerns and ban all kinds of just basic speech on their apps, but banning a Chinese social network is so controversial.
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.
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.
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.
> Supreme Court wrote in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958):
>"It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for advancements of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."
Please don't accuse people of engaging in "low effort" comments. It doesn't add anything to the discussion. You can see that I've actually written quite a few very good and well-thought responses to discussion points raised by others. It's anything but low effort.
In a discussion where the First Amendment related to speech is at the center of the discussion, it's important for people to define what they mean by First Amendment Association versus Freedom of Speech as defined in the First Amendment, especially when the discussion is primarily framed as an issue relating to Freedom of Speech. If someone is asking for clarification of what someone else means, that adds to the discussion, it doesn't detract from it. We can't discuss things if people are unwilling to explain what they mean, particularly within context.
To that end, I'd encourage you to read the section on Limits on the Freedom of Association in the article you provided to see why that line of reasoning doesn't apply here.
As a substantive comment that adds meaningfully to the conversation? You think people believe you were asking the parent for clarification on their personal definition or usage of a word by broadly asking “what is x?”
Or are you suggesting due to you having other substantive comments elsewhere you are due the right to make unsubstantial comments that do not increase the level of the discussion?
I think you are being overly argumentative throughout the thread, the example I singled out being exceptionally bad.
The first amendment isn't simply broken into atomic bullet pointed freedoms that can individually be negotiated. The amendment specifically says "peaceably assemble", which is tied to speech, press, religious expression, and petitioning government in the text. It is part of a long historic stream of law and judicial decisions in the common law dating back to the Magna Carta. Free speech is not truly free if the government tells you where you can and can't do it. There is a long legal tradition saying as much.
> 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.
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.
> "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.
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.
My point is that whether or not TikTok is a “free speech platform” has nothing to do with the application 1st Amendment, it was about the offered argument, not the conclusion.
OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time all three branches got the First Amendment wrong (one of the most popular 1A mantras — the one about fire in a crowded theater — came from dicta in what is now widely recognized as one such instance.)
No, I didn't take it out of context: the argument be made was irrelevant to the conclusion it was offered to support. Choosing not to make an argument either way about the conclusion to add to that comment about how inappropriate the argument was in context is neither taking it out of context nor pedantic.
You didn't even address an argument. You literally took three words and dunked on them for not meaning anything on their own, when in context that is exactly the point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
"tit for tat" is a rational act after getting burned for cooperating.
You start open and cooperative, expect reciprocity, and when you don't get it you finally retaliate. A bad faith actor might even accuse you of not living up to your core values in order to persuade you into continuing to play the losing strategy.
The youngest tiktokers weren't even born yet or were just infants/toddlers when Google first got banned there. They may not understand what's going on here because by the time they came of age nearly all major western social media sites were already blocked there and for them it's status quo now. From their point of view the US is being the censor. They are at prime age to go on red book out of spite, but I hope they'll eventually understand.
Right now the issue is that the US mostly doesn't. The US market is far more open to China than the reverse, everyone knows this.
Free trade should also be fair trade.
Personally I wouldn't really give a shit about TikTok if the Chinese market was actually at all open to US companies for this area (and if there were reasonable protections about personal data in the US overall).
Tit for Tat. Mercantalism is quite effective in a world of Free Trade, but if everyone turns Mercantalistic it becomes unsustainable and burns out. Once the most Mercantalistic actors are wiped out and EVERYONE understands why such policies were bad, we can return to the principles of Free Trade.
It's freedom of speech until you say bad stuff about Americas 51st state in the middle east that's killing on average 5 children every day with our tax money.
That was not the freedom of speech your supposed to hear on social media. That's why it's a threat. Be like Twitter and ban those accounts instead.
China banned things for entirely different reasons. They want to control the information they don't like. TikTok is banned so that Chinese government can't do the same thing here and influence a very large percentage of the US population. Not saying they're doing it now, but in general I agree that the potential threat is there. You can already see how big is the social media influence on people, on their political views etc.
> You can already see how big is the social media influence on people, on their political views etc.
If that is the reason for the ban, namely that American citizens cannot discern propaganda from factual information themselves and as a result must have their information shaped for them to achieve or avoid certain political outcomes, then that is quite literally the same reason China has for controlling the information space
No offense but you did basically just say the same thing twice, just with a bit of a patriot-act touch up. China doesn't just ban things they "don't like". What they don't like is exactly what you just lined out
Arguing for individual humans to have freedom of speech to express their views is one thing, arguing for mega-corporations (look at the valuation estimates for Tiktok) to have freedom of speech for profit is quite another.
The more significant issue is that this is a bill of attainder. The fact that this was prima facia rejected by the courts is an indication that the NatSec state has corroded every branch of government, and we have a zombie government.
That is like saying we have freedom of speech but it doesn't apply if you are wealthy enough to afford a printing press. It is just a sleight of hand to avoid saying "we really don't".
Is it really controversial? Maybe there’s just a vocal minority but most people I know simply do not care… granted, I don’t hang out with many young ppl so there’s that..
According to the youth, it's more about a government censoring what speech their citizens can see. The CCP does it, sure. But America doing it feels new.
I dunno, it feels pretty normal to be upset when a government which ostensibly represents me does something that I feel is actively against my interests.
I don't think that you have to decry every horrible thing in the world to be upset when folks do things that you don't like to you.
"It's insane that China can engage in genocide but engaging in genocide ourselves is so controversial"
This isn't really a good argument. Someone else being horrible isn't grounds to be horrible yourself. There are better arguments for banning TikTok, like protecting the youth from having their brains rotted out.
India banned TikTok and a whole host of other Chinese apps and after a few days of moaning they moved completely on. So the evidence indicates that no one will actually care. And TikTok is even less sticky than say Twitter. TikTok isn’t about the relationship graph you painstakingly built. It’s about the algorithm and the FYP it populates. That can be recreated instantly. Moving away from Twitter was hard because one had to painstakingly recreate their followers list. But moving from TikTok is trivial as long as the new alternative provides enough automatically delivered entertainment.
This is scary because it also means that every foreign app can be banned and it will be fine in no time.
Foreign in UK, France etc means Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
The social graph isn’t a big deal if can be forced. People can just find the same people on the new thing. A few days of pain and its all fine, people who get locked out of their accounts or get banned do it all the time.
Because of the horrible UX of opening up this URL and literally the entire screen being covered by pop-ups... What the actual hell... Porn/warez sites in the 00s were better than this...
I'm always surprised how hard it is for people here to understand.
I guess the magic of TikTok was not immediately apparent to lay people or those who did not use it regularly.
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
I'm not sure it's the right thing to ban TikTok, but I'm not surprised people aren't protesting in the streets. My feeling is that most people are addicted to these apps, not using them for the utility or pleasure they bring. These users have a deep down sense that they'd be better off without these apps. Instagram won't be banned, but if it were I think there might be a similar non-reaction.
That doesn't characterize me or any of the folks I know who use the app.
I know what it feels like to be addicted- I used to drink quite heavily and often.
Why are you theorizing about people you don't know engaging in an activity which is foreign to you?
Can you state some of your media consumption preferences so we can deconstruct them and find their problematic aspects via a struggle session? If you're not up for that, why do you feel like it's okay to try and take that line with other adults?
>My feeling is that most people are addicted to these apps, not using them for the utility or pleasure they bring.
What if most people aren't addicted to them, and do simply find them useful and entertaining, and the hyperbole and discourse about how dangerous and addictive social media and "algorithms" are is a means to manufacture consent for the government regulating and controlling free speech?
What if it's a bigger problem that all the government has to do is gesture vaguely in the direction of China and many people will just roll over?
Not many people would protest a cigarette ban because the effects of smoking are very visible.
Not many people will protest a TikTok ban because it's largely happening to someone else and not very many people care about issues of free speech, as long as it's not happening to them.
I think TikTok is a negative influence on society, but not for any reasons that have to do with China really. I'd be much happier if the gov took strict actions on social media generally.
It doesn't really make much "sense," of course. I'm just day dreaming. I find the USA gov and the Chinese gov to both be pretty evil. The other social media gets to stay, though, because they are all in the USA.
Obviously banning TikTok or other social media gets into free speech violation territory. But if I could just wave my magic wand and make things that I think are bad go away, I'd ban the whole lot
> I’ve argued that TikTok’s biggest wounds have been self-inflicted — snooping on journalists, restricting transparency, obscuring its ties to China — and that it developed a trust deficit with U.S. lawmakers that would be hard to overcome. But I don’t think that’s why most American TikTok users aren’t protesting a ban, either.
Guy is ideologically opposed to TikTok and is reasoning backwards. I mean what’s more emblematic of that than writing a thinkpiece on a what-if?
> It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that if the ban takes effect, millions of screen-addicted TikTok users will start reading “Ulysses” and taking long walks in their spare time. But maybe it’s reasonable to see the shrugs surrounding TikTok’s disappearance and wonder if, after years of giving that app our attention, we’re ready to invest it somewhere else.
Buddhist monks of old would apparently position a novice in a cave by themselves, giving them nothing else to do than to meditate. He cannot possibly believe that the modern world minus Tik Tok is conducive to such apparently wholesome habits. There are dozens of alternatives in queue waiting to become the next pseudo-addiction.
I think what I will miss most about TikTok is its ability to teach me things that I would otherwise never have interest in. I've discovered so many musicians, writers, historians and niche curators it's such a shame that this is going away. I'm still surprised somehow no other company has been able to compete with how well TikTok has done discovery.
I'm always surprised how hard it is for people here to understand.
I guess the magic of TikTok was not immediately apparent to lay people or those who did not use it regularly.
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
Ever since I started using social media platforms, some 22 years ago, I've been through six platforms. Those platforms were once teeming with life, but eventually got shut down, bought out, or just died a natural death. Every time people were up in arms, but eventually migrated somewhere else.
But just because people migrate somewhere else doesn't mean they don't miss those old platforms. Many of these old platforms had unique aspects that were never quite replicated in later platforms
Member berries when the internet was hip and cool and UUCP was the only game in town, and everyone was a wonderfully insightful ray if sunshine? Yeah, me neither.
Decades ago we decided to ignore computer security issues and focus on riding Moore's law into the future instead. If our computers were secure we could still be running our own local forums etc.
Our dependency on walled gardens goes deep and is actually a national security issues.
Either it is a guilty pleasure and you are secretly relieved that the temptation is being removed.
Or prolonged use of the service has turned you into an apathetic apolitical blob of mindless jelly with no agency and no energy to effect change on your environment.
Apolitical is an interesting choice of description. My understanding is that the real motivation of banning TikTok is precisely the political influence it wields on the youth’s malleable minds.
It’s in American security interests to limit CCP’s access to American location data and ability to pipe propaganda into our eyeballs.
But setting the ban to go into effect one day before the next President takes office is brazenly political and undermines the actually-important problem that TikTok represents.
When Twitter got weird, Bluesky was ready to come in as a total clone and succeed. I’m sure there are a dozen companies ready to make their case that they should replace TT…it’ll be fine.
The argument to ban TikTok is for trade reciprocity reasons. Reels and Youtube Shorts are banned there, so we should ban TikTok here. Just like how if Germany banned Fords and Chevys from being sold, we should similarly ban VWs and Audis.
That they say this is for "National Security" gives the game away.
"Everyone’s joining 小紅書 and getting fully Xi-pilled."
This shows that seo-speedwagon is opposed to mainland China. Writing the name in traditional characters, which are used in Taiwan, is another barb of seo-speedwagon against mainland China and its government.
Because that’s all you know! You are so myopically focused on every shitty thing that the US has ever done that you’ll believe anything that disparages the US, even when it comes from a foreign power trying to undermine you. For instance:
Imagine thinking the U.S. govt and corporate overlords are terrible because they’re banning TikTok and getting back at them by going to a Chinese app. China, the country which has a literal firewall preventing their people from getting information that isn’t vetted, bans nearly every external app because they don’t have control over it, and most ironically, never allowed TikTok, whose banning you think makes the U.S. govt terrible, in China in the first place.
It’s hilarious that all these Redpillers are going on about how they can now communicate with and learn from the Chinese people they’re meeting on Red Book without ever considering why they couldn’t meet those Chinese people on Tik Tok in the first place and coming to the conclusion that this shows that it was the U.S. govt that was bad…
Yeah, the lack of logical thinking in this one instance and your response to it only adds to the evidence that your generation is cooked.
1) the novelty of talking to entirely new people, which is a relative rarity since the early, heady days of MySpace when social media was new and gardens felt much less walled. For Gen Z, it might actually be a first given their average age; or
2) how the lives of average people compare to theirs and compare to their prior notions of what they thought life was like
These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
> These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
Sadly, since Rednote is monitored and censored by the CCP, the novelty and depth of those 'wow, your country is really like that?' conversations is rather one-sided. You can bet if the conversation is going to paint a country in a negative light (e.g. Ambulance rides), that country probably isn't going to be China.
Great point! I hope all those Americans who can't afford basic necessities in this so-called 'developed country' can take solace in the existence of Chinese censorship. Now they can even take solace in the expansion of American censorship!
In the end, what was the real revolutionary propaganda that the American establishment is afraid of? True cost of living statistics.
Actually I think you missed the point. The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want; it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country, and many (most?) don't even know about it. If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors.
Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities. The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
> The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want
Did you even read my comment?
> it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country
Wrong / highly misleading. Do you really think a country of 1.4 billion people can raise themselves out of poverty and overall dramatically raise the living standards for the masses without having a government that listens to the concerns of the people all across the country?
> If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors
I bet you the entire GDP of Canada that you don't know "what happened on June 4th".
What you are describing here, anti-establishment propaganda, is precisely the reasoning cited for the TikTok ban to begin with, and exactly the reason China has their firewall. So... uh... yeah?
Also VPN's are widely used in China so it really doesn't support your claim.
> Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities
Exactly! This proves how structurally powerless American freedom of speech is to enact real change. How is it that there were able to secure social services and unprecedented poverty reduction, or even had the political desire to?
> The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
This proves precisely zero things. This isn't even related to anything you said.
"The fact that we're discussing how broken healthcare is proves everything is fine!"
There's plenty more evidence out there that answers your other questions. That's just to refute the main concept of a 'fish in a barrel' style massacre that's been fed to us. Media also don't tell you that the protests were largely due to economic inequality and corruption that came as a direct, predicted result of economic liberalization from Deng. Consider also that the masses were literally JUST mobilized to seek out capitalism and destroy it violently during the cultural revolution when suddenly the elites in their society opened up to capitalism and even participated. They also don't tell you about the soldiers who were burned alive or shot by protesters, prior to any gunfire. Of a million there, between 300-600 protesters and plenty of soldiers too, wheras the media pushes the narrative that thousands were slaughtered like fish in a barrel in the middle of the square. Overall a tragic event and why social stability is so important, but it's not the "spirit of an oppressed people" that we're always told it is, they're just building the pretext for a "war of liberation" or other hostilities.
This is active propaganda. You think the Gov spends billions on propaganda overseas and they make no effort internally? I mean think about it for a moment.
An American and a Chinese citizen are having a discussion on Rednote about freedom in their respective countries. The American proudly says:
"In America, we have true freedom! I can stand in front of the White House and shout, 'I don’t like the President!' and nothing will happen to me."
The Chinese citizen thoughtfully replies:
"We have the same freedom in China. I can stand in front of Tiananmen Square and shout, 'I don’t like the American President!' and nothing will happen to me either."
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"American propaganda techniques? Sounds conspiratorial" says the American.
Great anecdote, I really like it and I'll definitely be using it myself with the parties reversed or changed in the future. But I can't help but feel like we're veering even further off topic here, since nobody was talking about the Russians or propaganda. If you had maybe changed the Russians to Chinese it could've been a real zinger, but I can only assume you just wanted to get what you thought would be a quick dunk in on me with your off topic anecdote.
Three paragraphs of non-sequiturs. Yeah they are taking revenge on their own government because it’s their own government which is governing the country they live in. “But what about China” doesn’t matter since they don’t live in China and they don’t plan to move to China.
They want to use an app. These geopolitical-ideological fault-lines doesn’t matter.
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.
Moreover it seems like security theater.
> 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.
That’s a stupid trade policy.
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-...
> Supreme Court wrote in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958):
>"It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for advancements of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."
In a discussion where the First Amendment related to speech is at the center of the discussion, it's important for people to define what they mean by First Amendment Association versus Freedom of Speech as defined in the First Amendment, especially when the discussion is primarily framed as an issue relating to Freedom of Speech. If someone is asking for clarification of what someone else means, that adds to the discussion, it doesn't detract from it. We can't discuss things if people are unwilling to explain what they mean, particularly within context.
To that end, I'd encourage you to read the section on Limits on the Freedom of Association in the article you provided to see why that line of reasoning doesn't apply here.
> What are First Amendment Association rights?
As a substantive comment that adds meaningfully to the conversation? You think people believe you were asking the parent for clarification on their personal definition or usage of a word by broadly asking “what is x?”
Or are you suggesting due to you having other substantive comments elsewhere you are due the right to make unsubstantial comments that do not increase the level of the discussion?
I think you are being overly argumentative throughout the thread, the example I singled out being exceptionally bad.
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.
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.
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.
OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time all three branches got the First Amendment wrong (one of the most popular 1A mantras — the one about fire in a crowded theater — came from dicta in what is now widely recognized as one such instance.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The youngest tiktokers weren't even born yet or were just infants/toddlers when Google first got banned there. They may not understand what's going on here because by the time they came of age nearly all major western social media sites were already blocked there and for them it's status quo now. From their point of view the US is being the censor. They are at prime age to go on red book out of spite, but I hope they'll eventually understand.
If this was a ban on an American company it would be a different story.
If Country A bans imports from Country B, it's entirely reasonable to respond in kind.
China infringing on the inalienable rights of Chinese citizens is not a source of strength. It's weakness. It hurts China.
Responding in kind is me responding to my neighbors fire by dousing the living room with gasoline and lighting a match.
Free trade should also be fair trade.
Personally I wouldn't really give a shit about TikTok if the Chinese market was actually at all open to US companies for this area (and if there were reasonable protections about personal data in the US overall).
That was not the freedom of speech your supposed to hear on social media. That's why it's a threat. Be like Twitter and ban those accounts instead.
If that is the reason for the ban, namely that American citizens cannot discern propaganda from factual information themselves and as a result must have their information shaped for them to achieve or avoid certain political outcomes, then that is quite literally the same reason China has for controlling the information space
No offense but you did basically just say the same thing twice, just with a bit of a patriot-act touch up. China doesn't just ban things they "don't like". What they don't like is exactly what you just lined out
The more significant issue is that this is a bill of attainder. The fact that this was prima facia rejected by the courts is an indication that the NatSec state has corroded every branch of government, and we have a zombie government.
The issue here isn't free speech, but control over what content is promoted, unless you think the CCP has the right to free speech in the US.
It would not be OK, but not because it is China. It would not be OK because it is not OK for anyone to do that.
Maybe Washington should figure out a way to make fewer "Foreign adversaries" so it doesn't have to subvert the fundamental rights of its citizens.
I don't think that you have to decry every horrible thing in the world to be upset when folks do things that you don't like to you.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea that something that is normal in an authoritarian society is verboten and sacrilegious in a Democracy.
This isn't really a good argument. Someone else being horrible isn't grounds to be horrible yourself. There are better arguments for banning TikTok, like protecting the youth from having their brains rotted out.
Foreign in UK, France etc means Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
The social graph isn’t a big deal if can be forced. People can just find the same people on the new thing. A few days of pain and its all fine, people who get locked out of their accounts or get banned do it all the time.
Because of the horrible UX of opening up this URL and literally the entire screen being covered by pop-ups... What the actual hell... Porn/warez sites in the 00s were better than this...
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
I know what it feels like to be addicted- I used to drink quite heavily and often.
Why are you theorizing about people you don't know engaging in an activity which is foreign to you?
Can you state some of your media consumption preferences so we can deconstruct them and find their problematic aspects via a struggle session? If you're not up for that, why do you feel like it's okay to try and take that line with other adults?
What if most people aren't addicted to them, and do simply find them useful and entertaining, and the hyperbole and discourse about how dangerous and addictive social media and "algorithms" are is a means to manufacture consent for the government regulating and controlling free speech?
What if it's a bigger problem that all the government has to do is gesture vaguely in the direction of China and many people will just roll over?
...I find it interesting to think about whether using something due to addiction means you wouldn't protest if it's forcibly taken away.
In other words, I wonder if people would protest if cigarettes were banned.
Not many people will protest a TikTok ban because it's largely happening to someone else and not very many people care about issues of free speech, as long as it's not happening to them.
It doesn't really make much "sense," of course. I'm just day dreaming. I find the USA gov and the Chinese gov to both be pretty evil. The other social media gets to stay, though, because they are all in the USA.
Obviously banning TikTok or other social media gets into free speech violation territory. But if I could just wave my magic wand and make things that I think are bad go away, I'd ban the whole lot
And for two of the biggest social media companies specifically, they'd get to stay anyway because they're paying off the POTUS.
Guy is ideologically opposed to TikTok and is reasoning backwards. I mean what’s more emblematic of that than writing a thinkpiece on a what-if?
> It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that if the ban takes effect, millions of screen-addicted TikTok users will start reading “Ulysses” and taking long walks in their spare time. But maybe it’s reasonable to see the shrugs surrounding TikTok’s disappearance and wonder if, after years of giving that app our attention, we’re ready to invest it somewhere else.
Buddhist monks of old would apparently position a novice in a cave by themselves, giving them nothing else to do than to meditate. He cannot possibly believe that the modern world minus Tik Tok is conducive to such apparently wholesome habits. There are dozens of alternatives in queue waiting to become the next pseudo-addiction.
I guess the magic of TikTok was not immediately apparent to lay people or those who did not use it regularly.
In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.
It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".
I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.
Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.
There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.
People will use something else.
Billions of humans have managed to live out their lives without short form video and will be OK
Our dependency on walled gardens goes deep and is actually a national security issues.
This 102 year old American veteran who fought in WW2 sure will miss it.
It’s in American security interests to limit CCP’s access to American location data and ability to pipe propaganda into our eyeballs.
But setting the ban to go into effect one day before the next President takes office is brazenly political and undermines the actually-important problem that TikTok represents.
When Twitter got weird, Bluesky was ready to come in as a total clone and succeed. I’m sure there are a dozen companies ready to make their case that they should replace TT…it’ll be fine.
That they say this is for "National Security" gives the game away.
every car app and toaster sells that stuff in the free market
propaganda is the point- or as importantly, the inability to hush or neuter 'anti-american' viewpoints
US govt has propaganda too: schools are now required to teach that "1,500,000,000 people suffer under communism"
Is that the case though?
I also think not so many people will miss TikTok-ers.
seo-speedwagon wrote (emphasis mine):
"Everyone’s joining 小紅書 and getting fully Xi-pilled."
This shows that seo-speedwagon is opposed to mainland China. Writing the name in traditional characters, which are used in Taiwan, is another barb of seo-speedwagon against mainland China and its government.
Absolute insufferable.
REDNote.
https://x.com/OrganizerMemes/status/1879723864936370347#m Guess what! You also have to pay for an ambulance in China!
https://x.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1880176802993434698#m Wrong. Americans spend about 12% of their income on groceries and work less than the Chinese on average.
You are not immune to propaganda.
But also I care a lot less about the CCP because they have very little impact on my day to day
It’s hilarious that all these Redpillers are going on about how they can now communicate with and learn from the Chinese people they’re meeting on Red Book without ever considering why they couldn’t meet those Chinese people on Tik Tok in the first place and coming to the conclusion that this shows that it was the U.S. govt that was bad…
Yeah, the lack of logical thinking in this one instance and your response to it only adds to the evidence that your generation is cooked.
1) the novelty of talking to entirely new people, which is a relative rarity since the early, heady days of MySpace when social media was new and gardens felt much less walled. For Gen Z, it might actually be a first given their average age; or
2) how the lives of average people compare to theirs and compare to their prior notions of what they thought life was like
These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
Sadly, since Rednote is monitored and censored by the CCP, the novelty and depth of those 'wow, your country is really like that?' conversations is rather one-sided. You can bet if the conversation is going to paint a country in a negative light (e.g. Ambulance rides), that country probably isn't going to be China.
In the end, what was the real revolutionary propaganda that the American establishment is afraid of? True cost of living statistics.
Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities. The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
> The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want
Did you even read my comment?
> it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country
Wrong / highly misleading. Do you really think a country of 1.4 billion people can raise themselves out of poverty and overall dramatically raise the living standards for the masses without having a government that listens to the concerns of the people all across the country?
> If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors
I bet you the entire GDP of Canada that you don't know "what happened on June 4th".
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
What you are describing here, anti-establishment propaganda, is precisely the reasoning cited for the TikTok ban to begin with, and exactly the reason China has their firewall. So... uh... yeah?
Also VPN's are widely used in China so it really doesn't support your claim.
> Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities
Exactly! This proves how structurally powerless American freedom of speech is to enact real change. How is it that there were able to secure social services and unprecedented poverty reduction, or even had the political desire to?
> The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
This proves precisely zero things. This isn't even related to anything you said.
"The fact that we're discussing how broken healthcare is proves everything is fine!"
> GALLO SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.
Yes, a Chilean diplomat was seen as neutral, but was then debriefed by the Americans two weeks later.
This is active propaganda. You think the Gov spends billions on propaganda overseas and they make no effort internally? I mean think about it for a moment.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird#External...
That viral post is incorrect! Ambulance rides cost money in China! You are not immune to propaganda!
"In America, we have true freedom! I can stand in front of the White House and shout, 'I don’t like the President!' and nothing will happen to me."
The Chinese citizen thoughtfully replies:
"We have the same freedom in China. I can stand in front of Tiananmen Square and shout, 'I don’t like the American President!' and nothing will happen to me either."
if its looking like it wont be they gun you down. see: occupy wall st., unionization efforts
"American propaganda techniques? Sounds conspiratorial" says the American.
"Exactly," the Russian replies.
It's spite. Obviously. The point isn't that the CCP is better.
They want to use an app. These geopolitical-ideological fault-lines doesn’t matter.