This is a very close call. And as someone whom the White House specifically targeted for my social media posts, I have a unique perspective on Biden Administration claims of "disinformation."
It's a trap, Alex. The bill contains a lot of vague language giving POTUS broad power to ban platforms in the interest of "national security". Just say no.
Hard no. This is pure authoritarianism. (Also it's like an abusive huband getting really angry at someone else trying to beat his wife. "How dare the Chinese steal the data of American citizens! That's our job!")
As usual, bipartisan support in Congress means the rest of us are screwed :(
Spying is a fake concern. China started spying on us heavily in the 80s as we INVITED thousands of "students" into research universities and military research labs. I saw it up close at Penn State. The "students" were quite open about their spying goals. Since then we've INVITED China to make all of our chips, and you can be sure they have back doors. Tiktok can't possibly add anything meaningful to the total ownership of all our tech, both civilian and military.
Great article. Not tricky at all. We must always error on the side of free speech.
Here's the real problem with TikTok and the rest of the IQ tampons:
"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.
In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.
A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
People have an unquenchable and irresistible capacity to take extended vacations from reality.
The propagandist preys on this with distractions. Because they know as powerful as truth may be; silence about truth is more powerful.
They seek to limit a person's ability to "know" themselves in relation to the total available experiences because this limits a person's ability, deep down inside, to know who they are. This is a surefire way of divorcing people from themselves which becomes a shortcut for manipulation and dogma.
With the ultimate goal to make one group of people forget that another group of people are human.
The idea of banning TikTok is just another scam: If China wants to invest in something, they can just do it through multiple shell companies which own pieces of other companies which control the parent. That is, they don’t need to own TikTok directly. The real question is “who benefits financially by banning TikTok?”
I think Tic Toc is detrimental and a true threat. The issue is Government control over speech is a greater threat. Keep in mind how successful the Patriot Act has been. The honesty and integrity of the oversight provided by FISA. This is a very slippery slope and I side with less Government control
The real goal here is to provide the CIA, FBI, and DoD with an insanely powerful weapon in their continued campaign of psychological warfare against its own citizens. Funny how they found a former Treasury Secretary, who just bought a failed bank with a magical $1B, to take on this noble task of protecting us simple folk. I find it hard to believe that the US Government has benevolent "bipartisan" agreement on protecting the very citizens it despises.
Ok...if we buy your final conclusion.....divest the China portion of TikTok.......then why haven't they got the Chinese out of ALL US commerce?? Stop trading with them. No more medicines from China. No more kitchen tables from China. No more Chinese ownership of farm lands or businesses......and on and on.
Alex, they will not....because of your initial fears of this proposed divesture.
It is another Patriot Act, Domino Theory, Saving-the-World-for-Democracy, DEI, right-to-vote-nonsense..........and to a lesser extent --- set belt laws, second-hand-smoke banning smoking in bars while allow you to inebriate yourself............!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not buying it. I do understand why gov does not allow their employees to have it on gov devices.
It does not matter. It will pass. They never listen. And again....the US citizen doesn't care about the details.
Of course, TikTok is horrible. But so is being enslaved to your iPhone. This is only one small aspect of what these devices are doing to your brain. I know you think you can’t function without them. You may be right. I could not buy a ticket to a major league baseball game last year (well sort of major league, it was the Pirates) because I don’t own a smart (?) phone. Cheap? No. I don’t want my boss texting me at 10pm nor do I care what you ate for breakfast.
I have a 16yo daughter and yet TikTok does not concern me one iota. Guess why. She doesn’t have a phone either. We drove to Daytona Beach last month and there she was, in the back seat, reading a book. You remember books, right?
Don’t ban TikTok. How about a warning each time you access it that all your data may be stolen by commies, and you are being tracked? Or don’t buy them a smart phone and put the money you save in a 529. You may not realize this, but in emergencies, you can make phone calls on a flip phone.
Alex, close call let’s ban it? Is it? This is America. We let people read, view, discuss or dance to anything they want without exception. That’s the First Amendment, which the last time I looked had no exceptions. There are no asterisks.
I suspect you have been listening to the Elliott Abrahams , Tom Cottons or the MSNBC’s of this world too much. These guys really fear China which built great walls to keep marauders and other n’er do well out, not build big boats with airplanes on them to search out and chase some poor gang of thugs while leveling their country, leaving it to despair and ruins too chase after some more evil doers in another third world resource heavy land.
China seems guilty of making about 95% of all our stuff, making high speed rail, subways and port facilities in poor countries all over the world. Activities that I find less annoying than say dropping agent orange on your open space or 2000# bombs on your city.
If you really fear China, please explain why and then make the case that it’s worth blowing up our most basic, cherished and essential freedom, our First Amendment.
After working for Goldman Sachs, I REALLY do not trust Goldman Sachs
But out of all of these options - I trust the US lawmakers and special interest groups that fund said lawmakers and are jerking off to this even less.
This opens the door for so much “ooops we didn‘t think the law would have been used THAT way“ that it will make the abused of the Patriot Act look mild in comparison.
The law they are wanting to pass isn’t limited to TIK TOK. It gives the Federal government the authority to go after anyone or anything with sweeping new powers. It needs to be specific to TIK TOK not sweeping as it currently is. It’s a massive incumbency protection bill. Stop it or limit its reach to just TIK TOK.
FedGov doesn’t give a rat’s ass about China owning anything in the United States—from our debt, to land, to Smithfield Foods, etc.
Not does it care about thousands of cultural trends or influences that “threaten” American society and perpetuate cultural decline. GMAFB.
If you don’t use TikTok, you can’t see the obvious reason why FedGov wants a ban. It’s two things: dissident content creators, videos raw and unfiltered by any layer of editing—private or public.
What percentage of Americans is aware of the European farmers dumping bails of hay, literally spraying cow shit all over public buildings in Brussels while standing toe to toe with the riot cops. Have you seen it? Or the Gilet Jaunes protests in France that have been going on since 2018?
I wasn’t even on TikTok, until the first attempt to ban it. It’s the only social media platform I’m on since 2020 when the online censorship regime dropped.
One thing I’ve learned in life. If the government wants to ban something, take a hard look at it because there’s usually a real motive apart from the official.
Here is the real reason, unlike, Twitter, Facebook, Substac, etc FedGov can’t control TikTok if it’s foreign owned.
FedGov has to ban TikTok otherwise it can’t monopolize the 5GW battle space.
Like you I’m ambivalent about a ban on TikTok, but there is also language in the house passed bill giving the president/ executive branch the power to shut down websites and apps of which it disapproves. Given the government’s penchant for squashing criticism that is very scary. This bill as it stands should not be passed. But if it does SCOTUS should strike it down as a violation of the first amendment.
They will use this law to come after Twitter. The law allows them to censor anything they define as under foreign influence.
It's a trap, Alex. The bill contains a lot of vague language giving POTUS broad power to ban platforms in the interest of "national security". Just say no.
Hard no. This is pure authoritarianism. (Also it's like an abusive huband getting really angry at someone else trying to beat his wife. "How dare the Chinese steal the data of American citizens! That's our job!")
As usual, bipartisan support in Congress means the rest of us are screwed :(
Spying is a fake concern. China started spying on us heavily in the 80s as we INVITED thousands of "students" into research universities and military research labs. I saw it up close at Penn State. The "students" were quite open about their spying goals. Since then we've INVITED China to make all of our chips, and you can be sure they have back doors. Tiktok can't possibly add anything meaningful to the total ownership of all our tech, both civilian and military.
Great article. Not tricky at all. We must always error on the side of free speech.
Here's the real problem with TikTok and the rest of the IQ tampons:
"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.
In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.
A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
People have an unquenchable and irresistible capacity to take extended vacations from reality.
The propagandist preys on this with distractions. Because they know as powerful as truth may be; silence about truth is more powerful.
They seek to limit a person's ability to "know" themselves in relation to the total available experiences because this limits a person's ability, deep down inside, to know who they are. This is a surefire way of divorcing people from themselves which becomes a shortcut for manipulation and dogma.
With the ultimate goal to make one group of people forget that another group of people are human.
The idea of banning TikTok is just another scam: If China wants to invest in something, they can just do it through multiple shell companies which own pieces of other companies which control the parent. That is, they don’t need to own TikTok directly. The real question is “who benefits financially by banning TikTok?”
I think Tic Toc is detrimental and a true threat. The issue is Government control over speech is a greater threat. Keep in mind how successful the Patriot Act has been. The honesty and integrity of the oversight provided by FISA. This is a very slippery slope and I side with less Government control
The real goal here is to provide the CIA, FBI, and DoD with an insanely powerful weapon in their continued campaign of psychological warfare against its own citizens. Funny how they found a former Treasury Secretary, who just bought a failed bank with a magical $1B, to take on this noble task of protecting us simple folk. I find it hard to believe that the US Government has benevolent "bipartisan" agreement on protecting the very citizens it despises.
At this point, I am less scared of China than internal censorship & control
Ok...if we buy your final conclusion.....divest the China portion of TikTok.......then why haven't they got the Chinese out of ALL US commerce?? Stop trading with them. No more medicines from China. No more kitchen tables from China. No more Chinese ownership of farm lands or businesses......and on and on.
Alex, they will not....because of your initial fears of this proposed divesture.
It is another Patriot Act, Domino Theory, Saving-the-World-for-Democracy, DEI, right-to-vote-nonsense..........and to a lesser extent --- set belt laws, second-hand-smoke banning smoking in bars while allow you to inebriate yourself............!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not buying it. I do understand why gov does not allow their employees to have it on gov devices.
It does not matter. It will pass. They never listen. And again....the US citizen doesn't care about the details.
Of course, TikTok is horrible. But so is being enslaved to your iPhone. This is only one small aspect of what these devices are doing to your brain. I know you think you can’t function without them. You may be right. I could not buy a ticket to a major league baseball game last year (well sort of major league, it was the Pirates) because I don’t own a smart (?) phone. Cheap? No. I don’t want my boss texting me at 10pm nor do I care what you ate for breakfast.
I have a 16yo daughter and yet TikTok does not concern me one iota. Guess why. She doesn’t have a phone either. We drove to Daytona Beach last month and there she was, in the back seat, reading a book. You remember books, right?
Don’t ban TikTok. How about a warning each time you access it that all your data may be stolen by commies, and you are being tracked? Or don’t buy them a smart phone and put the money you save in a 529. You may not realize this, but in emergencies, you can make phone calls on a flip phone.
Alex, close call let’s ban it? Is it? This is America. We let people read, view, discuss or dance to anything they want without exception. That’s the First Amendment, which the last time I looked had no exceptions. There are no asterisks.
I suspect you have been listening to the Elliott Abrahams , Tom Cottons or the MSNBC’s of this world too much. These guys really fear China which built great walls to keep marauders and other n’er do well out, not build big boats with airplanes on them to search out and chase some poor gang of thugs while leveling their country, leaving it to despair and ruins too chase after some more evil doers in another third world resource heavy land.
China seems guilty of making about 95% of all our stuff, making high speed rail, subways and port facilities in poor countries all over the world. Activities that I find less annoying than say dropping agent orange on your open space or 2000# bombs on your city.
If you really fear China, please explain why and then make the case that it’s worth blowing up our most basic, cherished and essential freedom, our First Amendment.
Charlie DeSantis
I don‘t trust the CCP or ByteDance
I don‘t trust Steven Mnuchin
After working for Goldman Sachs, I REALLY do not trust Goldman Sachs
But out of all of these options - I trust the US lawmakers and special interest groups that fund said lawmakers and are jerking off to this even less.
This opens the door for so much “ooops we didn‘t think the law would have been used THAT way“ that it will make the abused of the Patriot Act look mild in comparison.
The law they are wanting to pass isn’t limited to TIK TOK. It gives the Federal government the authority to go after anyone or anything with sweeping new powers. It needs to be specific to TIK TOK not sweeping as it currently is. It’s a massive incumbency protection bill. Stop it or limit its reach to just TIK TOK.
FedGov doesn’t give a rat’s ass about China owning anything in the United States—from our debt, to land, to Smithfield Foods, etc.
Not does it care about thousands of cultural trends or influences that “threaten” American society and perpetuate cultural decline. GMAFB.
If you don’t use TikTok, you can’t see the obvious reason why FedGov wants a ban. It’s two things: dissident content creators, videos raw and unfiltered by any layer of editing—private or public.
What percentage of Americans is aware of the European farmers dumping bails of hay, literally spraying cow shit all over public buildings in Brussels while standing toe to toe with the riot cops. Have you seen it? Or the Gilet Jaunes protests in France that have been going on since 2018?
I wasn’t even on TikTok, until the first attempt to ban it. It’s the only social media platform I’m on since 2020 when the online censorship regime dropped.
One thing I’ve learned in life. If the government wants to ban something, take a hard look at it because there’s usually a real motive apart from the official.
Here is the real reason, unlike, Twitter, Facebook, Substac, etc FedGov can’t control TikTok if it’s foreign owned.
FedGov has to ban TikTok otherwise it can’t monopolize the 5GW battle space.
Like you I’m ambivalent about a ban on TikTok, but there is also language in the house passed bill giving the president/ executive branch the power to shut down websites and apps of which it disapproves. Given the government’s penchant for squashing criticism that is very scary. This bill as it stands should not be passed. But if it does SCOTUS should strike it down as a violation of the first amendment.