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House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok
(edition.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Saw another post that had many great points. What if TikTok leaned into propaganda, topics like reunification with Taiwan? I promise that will effect us, big time.
China absolutely doesn't want the US talking about Taiwan or the island of Taipei at all. They want the West to forget it exists entirely so they can "reunify" with it the same way they squashed out Democracy Riots in Hong Kong once the west got bored and stopped paying attention.
What if China bought targeted ads on Meta?
That's never affected our country at all...
Good point, let's censor political speech.
I agree that would be problematic.
However I'm not willing to allow the government to ban a social media platform that a lot of people enjoy and rely on for community building (or even their livelihoods, in a lot of creators' cases) on a "what if".
Think about the precedent this sets. What could it be used on next?
In case I'm being downvoted because you think I'm worried about a slippery slope for no reason, I'll link the full text of the bill here.
The process is basically that the president determines that an app is an issue, notifies Congress (who does not need to give approval), then within a certain time period the foreign owner of the all must divest ownership or it would become illegal to distribute that app.
There are definitions laid out in the text. I see nothing that would stop them from banning foreign news sources or potentially foreign shopping platforms except for the clause about "permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content", which could be broadly interpreted.
Do you really want to give the executive branch basically unchecked power to limit our access to voices from outside the country?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1
I think you're farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we've ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.
Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren't seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?
I think maybe the reason you aren't fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That's fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.
Can it be used on conservatives and fascists? Can we use it to destroy right wing media outlets and overthrow the 1996 Telecommunications Act? Can we use it to band together and hunt down evangelicals who commit child abuse through radical indoctrination? Can we use it to hunt down corporate lobbyists and the Congressmen who take their bribes?
Not unless those things are owned by foreign companies, which I doubt those are
What if isn't a valid reason for jack shit.
It already happened in other countries. Philippines and Indonesia elected their old dictators after a successful campaign on TikTok to whitewash their crimes so that Gen Z vote for them.