
Free Speech
Is only allowed when the Government allows it...
TikTok is just about out of options to save itself from a looming ban in the United States, though that hasn't stopped one US senator from planning a bill to extend the divest-or-dumped deadline another 270 days past this Sunday. That's right: Barring a 90-day extension by Biden; a multi-billion dollar deal is agreed upon and …
Apparently if you work for TikToc in the US, you have to sign an oath supporting China’s “socialist system” and “national interests" and swear not to divulge “state secrets,” disrupt “national honor” or undermine “ethnic unity."
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths-china-socialist-system-court-documents/
Roj, free speech existed before the internet, before newspapers and before television. You are saying that the government can control what is said on all of those platforms because they came after free speech.
Do you think it is literally about the phsyical act of speaking? What the fuck are you trying to say?
"I'm saying that there are plenty of other ways to exercise your right to free speech."
The Right of free speech in the US isn't what many people think it is.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The government wouldn't be abridging the freedom of speech if they ban TikTok for security reasons (if they can articulate good reasons) since that would come under commerce rather than a Constitutional Right.
In this case, the US government isn't making a law restricting free speech since it isn't prohibiting people from express that right in another forum without penalty. If you attend a golf tournament and start shouting about government/politicians/religion, if they take you away in irons it might be argued that it was for your own protections since golf fans can get quite vicious. It's also an inappropriate venue to air your opinions. There are other adjudicated restrictions. You are welcome to lie in many places, but if you do so to create panic/fear/unrest, you could still be arrested without there being any ability to appeal on the grounds of "free speech". If a CEO, I have one in mind, lies about important company matters, that's not free speech, it's stock manipulation at the very least.
Being banned and voluntarily shutting down because everyone hates you and won't agree to buy your product are two separate things. Even if the end of publication had been because the business was fined so much for breaking the laws they broke and couldn't afford to continue, that would be different. I am no fan of TikTok. I have not used it and will not change that. If a law was passed making something that TikTok did criminal, and TikTok refused to stop doing it, I would not object (I suppose it depends on whether I agreed that the thing in question was a problem). However, that didn't happen. Instead, a law was passed simply declaring that TikTok is not allowed. I have concerns about that kind of law even if I don't care for the target of this one.
I would just prefer it, if TikTok was just shut down totally, in the US and in other countries too - never mind just removing it's app from app stores.
It is just a vessel for some quite lurid "creators" (despite the so-called content moderation) and a lot of fake news and fake adverts, so despite it originating as an app for teens to use, it has actually become more of all-encompassing vehicle for a lot of rubbish.
(I've used TikTok for a while going back a year or two, but it has gotten a lot worse now for all the mindless drivel it displays).
First: The tickytockies sound like a toddler when you take their lollypops away. You are definitely addicted.
Second: It was easy as pie to get these people to move to the next platform. Too easy for china.
Third: Never fear, The Emperor With no Clothes can do what ever he wants as an official act of "The President".
Actually, it was discovered (see "Voodoo Economics") that low level drug sales pays less than minimum wage.
I'm not into the whole influencer thing myself but a surprising number of businesses and politicians use TikTok.
But then I suppose its traditional to ban anything that young people like as drivel, bad for them etc. These current and future voters are unlikely to forget.
"Tripe spouting clowns, er, sorry, influencers lose money?"
Hey! It's a hard slog to come up with all of that "content" while recovering from the latest round of plastic surgery or having spent yet another fortnight in A&E from the latest exhibition of stupidity.
I find it interesting that these people (if they even are people) would rather join the red army, than recognize the monster they themselves created.
Number 3: Frumpy pants will hand it off to one of his mob buddies, probably muskrat, who will fire you all, and turn into AI fluencers. You all belong to the interests of the dictatorship now, and will be assimilated.
"You have never seen a more wretched hive of villainy."
"Real people make real money off TikTok, whether you like it or not."
If you base a business on something controlled by another company much larger than yours, you need to have mm-wave radar to check ice thickness. It's bad risk management even though I see the same thing with people on YouTube. They've optimized their content in a way that only works on YT and they have no way to move anywhere else without a lot of editing if that will even help as Google finds more convenience items they can get people addicted to that won't transfer to another service. There's Youtubers that have lost all of their content by not backing up and their channel was locked out due to various strikes (some being malicious copyright allegations).
If you are making money on TikTok or any similar service and that's your sole gig, you need to ask yourself what you can do if that goes away/changes. There's something about TikTok that the US politicians don't like. Maybe they aren't getting free services and automatic boosts for being politicians. The reason floating around is that it's a government run spying operation by China. Maybe it's just an easy target for politicians that have no other way to lash out at China for being better at capitalism than they are. It's not like 16yo's can vote so if they shut it down, they won't lose too much while being seen "doing something".
What's funny is you thinking the Chinese had to get them to move. Sounds like you don't have kids.
I'd say people are not raising their kids correctly. No wonder we are so, so f***ed.
First thing you need to do is invite all their virtual friends over for a sleep over to make sure they are real people. Second thing you need to do is show them the movies "red dawn", and "iron eagle".
Millions didn't give their lives so their grandkids could run off and join the red army.
Also, tell them cartoon chicks are not real, and are not "hot". They're cartoons.
What's funny is you thinking the Chinese had to get them to move. Sounds like you don't have kids.
Democrats aren't that smart-
"Now that my colleagues understand that the TikTok ban is real, we need time to have a deeper conversation about how to address the national security risk caused by ByteDance's ownership of TikTok," Sen. Markey continued. "We need time to understand the ban's implication on TikTok's creators and users. We need time to consider alternative ideas."
It's been pretty funny reading various 'experts' speculating that Trump, MrBeast or some tame American might buy TikTok(US) and be gifted the US customers and code. ByteDance kept pointing out that it wasn't for sale. Meanwhile, as you say creators & users have already considered alternative ideas and are jumping ship to RedNote, which operates outside the US. Apparently the Kardashians have already switched. Oh the humanity!
One interesting aspect is the impact this might have of the legions of 'influencers', who've made their careers out of posting debt fuelled 'lifestyle' videos. Maybe some will switch to posting YT Shorts (eww) or just posing outside soup kitchens, or on public transport rather than leased (or other peoples) lambos. I'm thinking of maybe tapping into this audience with shorts on how to refill Crysal bottles using a soda stream, so foaming agent to help influencers continue their fake lifestyles on a budget.
I've noticed this as well. I put it down to the changing nature of IT in the Anglosphere. When ElReg first started out "computers" were dominated by long haired weirdos (actually, ordinary people in need of a haircut) who generally being well educated had a rather broad minded view of the world. Over the years IT has become a 'good job', the sort of relatively well paid job that puts the workforce a cut above the hoi-polloi, with it becoming a lot more conservative (as in "defensive of the status quo") in the process.
This also shows up in the technology where a lot of the fundamentals, the underpinnings of the technology, have been replaced by conformist technologies and their frameworks. So, for example, you'll read about something like "TP-Link routers being a National Security risk" with lots of to and fro about whether they represent a risk or not but not a peep from anyone who understands the technology and is capable of either investigating such claims or doing something about them. (Such people do still exist but, alas, they don't seem to read this site any more.)
I think that it coincides in time with covid. Lots of computer people loved to work from home, which they – probably – mostly could, without noticing that for the rest of the population (like 99% of the rest of the population) it was impossible and undesirable. Therefore, the IT people needed to construct a narrative of why this covid thing was a big danger for all of humanity, and once you had gone down the slippery road it is very difficult to stop the madness. And now, the same "we're all gonna die " is served with the climate, Russia, China, and any other overblown happening in the world that can somehow, even very very far fetched, be used to control and censor.
Look no further than Romania where they have simply canceled the presidential elections because the "wrong" candidate was going to win and they blamed it on TikTok : you'll see that there will be some weirdo here who will try to justify even that EU diktat.
"ByteDance could be legally compelled by the Chinese authorities to influence netizens to suit President Xi's wishes by carefully selecting which videos they see, or could snoop on them, and so on.The software maker has insisted this has not and would not happen."
The difference between this and X/Meta, is that X/Meta make no such promises with regard to President Trumps wishes. From what I've seen of TikTok, Xi's wishes must be very odd.
Really ?
Maybe you could have planned ahead ? <slap> Idiot, what am I saying. You're Senators, you don't plan, you react.
When you have time.
Well, you don't.
By the way, when do you plan to have the time to plan on defending Humanity from the next asteroid strike ? When it's a month away ?
"By the way, when do you plan to have the time to plan on defending Humanity from the next asteroid strike ? When it's a month away ?"
They'll have to wait to take that up after the current recess if they can get it on the agenda before the spring recess. With the law they passed a while back, that's as far in advance as they can put things on the schedule.
It looks as if at least one senator has just realised that a lot of voters, his voters, or, even more significantly, potential voters use TikTok, irrespective of what we might feel about its merits, and would be very unhappy to have it taken away from them. I suppose he'll get credit from both sides - for at least trying and for leaving it so late as to have no effect.
In the meantime, if the argument is that it's dangerous to have social media operating on one's country owned by companies in the jurisdiction of another, then governments here, in the rest of the world, should be considering similar bans on US-owned companies, especially here where we have GDPR. Instead what we have is all sorts of legal jiggery-pokery to pretend that it's OK to have personal data exported to a country where such protection is unknown.
@breakfast : yes, I think that that's what the Chinese retaliation will be : ban Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Amazon ... out of national security concerns. I wonder who gets to lose more. Especially if China manages to "convince" 3-rd party countries to join the fray. If Trump is too keen on tariffs on imports from Europe, even Europe could join that party and ban the GAFA
As for TikTok itself, I don't use it but my kids do and they say that they learn a lot on there. Certainly more than looking at pictures of latte-machiato made by Starbucks in Dubaï.
I have seen it suggested that TikTok showing videos from people in Palestine and protests in the US that never get mainstream coverage are a significant part of the reason for the ban. I don't know enough to be able to judge whether that is true, but I would be surprised if it hadn't contributed.
"The Great Firewall prevents users from accessing foreign news sites such as the BBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. 8 Foreign web services that are blocked include Facebook, Google, X, Instagram, Snapchat, Yahoo, Slack, and YouTube."
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/why-facebook-banned-china.asp
Those platforms are banned in China. I think the difference is, if you call Trump a cockend on those platforms, despite the government seeing it, the goon squad won't be sent to your door to make you disappear. However, in China this happens. Although with Trumps second term he might try to make it happen.
In China they started using the term Winnie the Pooh to reference Xi cause he looks like him. This was to get around censors. When the CCP realised, all Winnie the Pooh references were banned. If you start calling Trump a big orange twat, on the western apps, they won't ban the term "big orange twat".
If your kid dies at school in China, the CCP doesn't what anyone to know anything and the Chinese people have had enough.
https://youtu.be/pnmfhygGGsw?si=CMqieBEfO9UVzOvH
There's another reason:
(Pro-Palestinian posts significantly outnumbered pro-Israeli posts on TikTok)
https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/05/10/israel-hamas-tiktok-research/
(How much money and influence does AIPAC wield?)
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/how-much-money-and-influence-does-aipac-wield/
"The argument being that the social network is used by millions of teen and adult Americans, on millions of their devices, and thus presents a national security risk as China and the United States are adversaries: ByteDance could be legally compelled by the Chinese authorities to influence netizens to suit President Xi's wishes by carefully selecting which videos they see, or could snoop on them, and so on"
So they are banning TikTok on a it COULD happen, not we have evidence of it happening?
This is from a country where millions of guns are in circulation which DO cause actual harm to US citizens every year, but i don't see any US politicians calling for the banning of guns.
"National Security" is just a blanket excuse to get around all sorts of legal and Constitutional hurdles to impressing the will of the minority on the majority. We're using the same excuse to ban Chinese vehicles in the US based on the rather flimsy argument that such vehicles could reveal location data to the Chinese (who if they really, really, wanted to know this would buy the data from a data broker just like everyone else does).
The free speech argument is a distraction and diversion. The Chinese government and it's citizens do not have U.S. Constitutional rights.
The problem is, by Chinese law, all companies must make all data collected and transversing their internet apps available to the Chinese Communist Party to further espionage, PI abuse, data theft, and all manner of activities which would be considered against the national interests and national security of the USA.
So it's entirely reasonable to enact a law preventing data on the TikTok app from being available to adversarial political parties as well as Chinese government sanctioned criminals.
The Supreme Court has made clear that they think anything a president does (at least if his name is Trump) is defacto legal, so there's nothing stopping Trump from telling ByteDance "buy $3 billion worth of Trumpcoin and I'll lift the ban".
So even if the ban hits on Jan. 19th it'll probably be lifted a few days later, but unless Trump makes public how many Trumpcoin he sold (or whatever other scammy vehicle he uses to get the money in his pocket) we'll never know about the dirty backdoor bribery.
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"ByteDance could be legally compelled by the Chinese authorities to influence netizens to suit President Xi's wishes by carefully selecting which videos they see, or could snoop on them, and so on."
Whereas American social media do that voluntarily.
Let's be completely honest here: Trump, Musk, Zuck, Bezos and the rest of that gang or robber barons have long been, and still are, using US-based social media as a weapon of mass distraction and misinformation in order to get where they are now. The last thing they want in the mix is a foreign social network they can't control. And make no mistake: control American social media they do.
Don't believe me. Believe those who are qualified to diagnose the problem.
"There is some whispering TikTok is otherwise set to simply cut off access to US users come Sunday." TikTok is a clear and clever CCP syop app. You make it so popular that anyone that mentions its a syop app is deemed "a conspiracy theorist". I hate conspiracies but its clear TikTok is a syop app. Its banned in China for a reason, all Western apps are banned in China, which is their right. You see no Western government going mental over western apps being banned. Yet the CCP, who claimed they have no involvment in TikTok getting massively bent out of shape when a ban warning appeared.
Its not even a ban, it will just be removed from the Apple store and Play store. The "We'll just turn the servers off for US residents" is an attempt to get US voters to argue it should stay. They won't do it because its so valuable to the CCP with all the devices its already installed on.
Anyway, its all dead now because Biden has decided to let Trump decide. If China give him enough money he'll allow it to stay or allow Musk to buy it. Musk is in bed with China because of his factories over there. So it will all just carry on as normal. The snooping will continue under the cover of Musk owning it.
The 50 cents lurk around these parts so expect downvotes.
"There is some whispering TikTok is otherwise set to simply cut off access to US users come Sunday." TikTok is a clear and clever CCP syop app. You make it so popular that anyone that mentions its a syop app is deemed "a conspiracy theorist". I hate conspiracies but its clear TikTok is a syop app.
You might get better at spotting, creating or debunking conspiracy theories, if you realised the word is 'psyop'. A contraction of psychological operations.
Its not even a ban, it will just be removed from the Apple store and Play store. The "We'll just turn the servers off for US residents" is an attempt to get US voters to argue it should stay. They won't do it because its so valuable to the CCP with all the devices its already installed on.
And like that, it was gone, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Biden banned it, Trump might save it. Bit of a PR own goal by the Democrats really, and a genius move by them to attract and retain young voters.
It was the orange idiots idea to ban tiktok in 2020. His supporters will deny this despite him saying it on video.
Now he's making himself look good by delaying the ban. He'll do a deal with the CCP, much like in his first term where his daughter was allowed patents in China. Oddly, considering China doesn't honor patents.
He'll try and get a deal where his family will own half of tiktok and he'll gift it to one of his sons. After all, he'll now have access to all the classified documents again that he can sell.
Sadly, he's become the king of grifters helped along by a large chunk of idiot Americans that voted for him. Even the ones he's now going to deport.