The House and Senate passed a bill and Biden signed it banning TikTok. The parent company must divest. It was buried in the foreign aid package they passed that sends money to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and nothing to shore up our own porous border that millions of illegals are pouring through.
Ignore that Congress can’t pass clean bills. I want to be clear about this bill. It can be used to regulate other social media platforms. The language is broad. It’s not just about TikTok. Hence, they could tell Elon Musk to divest from Twitter. Think they won’t do that?
TikTok is owned lock stock and barrel by the Communist Party of China. However, it did sell equity to many investors and some of those are independent American investors who made a lot of money from their investment. This isn’t any different than you putting money in a Chinese distribution business that crushes it. Remember, in a communist country, the communists own everything for the benefit of the public. Sounds an awful lot like a B Corporation.
I don’t think this is cut and dried or easy. Sure, China stops US companies from operating in China. China isn’t a lot different from any other communist society from Russia to Cuba. They are just smarter. Communists are totalitarian despots who kill their citizens and steal from their citizens.
I ignore the pleas from people who argue that tit for tat is the right strategy. I am empathetic to national security if there is evidence of it. The only thing I have seen with TikTok is that it is hyper addicting, and hard to get away from once you are hooked. There are a lot of very questionable videos on the platform that can cause people to think very terrible things, like antisemitism. But, there are a lot of harmless videos too.
Yes, people have built businesses on TikTok. They are gainfully self-employed because of it. I feel for them.
As biased as TikTok is to the Chinese, isn’t Facebook and Google in the back pocket of fascists, pro-centralized big government, socialists, and anti-American types? If we can ban TikTok, why can’t we take them out? It’s been shown academically that Google swayed the last election in favor of Democrats and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spent Zuckbucks to sway the election in favor of the Democrats. What is the difference between them and TikTok?
Who is a bigger threat to American security today? China or home grown terrorists?
Jeff Yass invested in the seed round of TikTok. He took a ton of risk, and he got paid in the billions for that investment. He donates to a lot of free market causes and Republicans. Yass is Jewish. Hence, many Democrats were casting political votes against TikTok not rational or objective ones.
Yass started a trading firm and was innovative. He continues to be innovative and assumes risk with his capital. Why should he be penalized?
Trump came out against the ban presumably because he’s going to benefit from the political donations of Yass. Rand Paul also did the same. Yass is a donor to Paul’s campaign.
"I hope saner minds will reflect on which is more dangerous: videos of teenagers dancing or the precedent of the U.S. government banning speech," Paul wrote. "For me, it’s an easy answer, I will defend the Bill of Rights against all comers, even, if need be, from members of my own party."
He added: "If you don’t like TikTok or Facebook or YouTube, don’t use them. But don’t think any interpretation of the Constitution gives you the right to ban them."
Yet those same platforms certainly ban conservatives.
Objectively, there is evidence that TikTok collects mountains of data on US citizens which is funneled to the China military. Does the data it collects reach the level of “national security” type data? I don’t know but there is a good chance that it might. A good AI engine can perform analysis if programmed correctly to use lots of disparate data to create a meaningful whole.
Paul’s point is a very good one. You don’t have to use it.
What about the freedom of a company to operate in the US? What about the rights of a business? What about the freedom of speech? Freedom to innovate?
There was a whole canon of rights that used to apply to individuals and businesses we relied on in the free market capitalist United States. It’s gone but it was gone before TikTok.
When conservative speakers have to hire armed guards, police departments and university police departments to give a speech on the topic of free speech at a university or civic function, the right to “free” speech is being impinged.
Biden had signed an executive order banning TikTok from government devices. That’s okay. It’s the government. If a CEO wanted to ban any app from a company computer system or device, that’s their prerogative and not infringing on any rights.
When I was a delegate to the i7/G7 in Torino, Italy, we had a debate on regulating platforms like Google and Facebook. A distinguished Italian computer science professor was in favor of a large amount of regulatory language to try and level the competitive playing field.
Another US delegate and I spoke out against regulation. How do you regulate a service that is free and no one is compelled to use? There are other search engines like Freespoke. There are other social media platforms besides Facebook. Sure, network effects make existing platforms powerful. The left who hate Elon Musk now after being big fanboys are finding that out with Twitter (X).
is not a lefty socialist like a lot of his Silicon Valley brethren. He is for a ban. From his blog which is a good read.(2) U.S. Threatens Ban if TikTok’s Chinese Owners Don’t Sell Stakes
John D. McKinnon for The Wall Street Journal
The Biden administration is demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell their stakes in the video-sharing app or face a possible U.S. ban of the app, according to people familiar with the matter.
Finally. We have long been proponents of U.S. regulation of TikTok, and it looks like the Biden Administration is now going to force the sale of TikTok in the U.S.
As Alec Stapp put it on Twitter: “We would never have allowed the Soviet Union to control programming on CBS, NBC, or ABC during the Cold War. Same applies to TikTok and the CCP.” For better or worse, we are in the beginnings of the Second Cold War, and this time our adversary is the CCP.
We’re not warmongers. We’re not geopolitical experts. I deeply wish that both the U.S. and China could be less zero-sum in their approach to all of this. That being said, it makes zero sense that the U.S. allows TikTok (in it’s current form) to operate in the U.S. My argument isn’t tit-for-tat: just because Meta and Google can’t operate in the China, doesn’t mean that TikTok shouldn’t be able to operate in U.S. My argument is more objective: our primary adversary controls the most powerful social technology in our country, and said adversary has a long track record of using powerful technologies to spy and manipulate on certain groups of people. It just doesn’t make sense.
Is the U.S. forcing TikTok to sell an optimistic story? Maybe not. But is it a story that American’s should feel very positively about? Absolutely.
No easy answers to this one. I am very unsettled about banning TikTok, but I empathize with the arguments for banning it. If I were a benevolent dictator, I wouldn’t ban it, but I’d watch it really closely.
Divesting and turning it into a non-Chinese-owned company isn’t the worst thing for freedom and free speech. Try to make an anti-CCP vid and get it shown on the Chinese network. Not happening. However, should the government decide who can be on your cap table and who should not be on your cap table?
I am also conflicted, because you cannot trust our government. However, I think unrestricted TikTok is more dangerous. A sophisticated CCP psyop.
I see speculation that ByteDance is considering the sale of TikTok minus the algorithm. They don't want us to see it. And they don't allow that algorithm in China.
You can intuit what a CCP algorithm aimed at our youth might promote by comparing it to the Facebook psych experiments on teens, and the Cambridge Analytica violations. One difference is that we were able to find out about these manipulations. We will never know what the CCP is doing.
They have repeatedly lied about the data storage issue, and that's way secondary to the manipulation of TikTok users.
I, too, am concerned the censorship industrial complex will go after X. I think Elon has erected a partial shield because he has open sourced the X algorithms. This isn't absolute, but if the Feds want to after him they will, with or without this law. Look what they are doing to Trump.
Great post Mr Carter! The whole situation is a bit of a "Gordian Knot". I agree with your view that the language in the bill is overly broad. It's alway overly broad in the swamps of DC. I also see the pragmatic reason to not allow our biggest global rival have such unfettered access to our country. What'd that wise man in Hong Kong say? "Don't trust China! China is asshole!"