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Seccurrity risk
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Well, the TikTok lawyers kinda said the quiet part out loud during their SCOTUS brief:
It's not a great look for your app when your argument before the Supreme Court is "yeah, we're a propaganda machine for a hostile foreign power, but free speech says you can't stop us. Neener neener."
The issue for common people regarding tiktok is more along the lines of foreign adversaries obtaining personal information of the users or using it to spy on the government. The idea that chinese propaganda would be in any way a threat is absurd and shouldn't even need to be defended in any way. "America bad" is hardly a hot take and they don't need to spread any lies to get that point across.
How is it any different than the Russian propaganda campaign to get Trump elected? Or was that something you were fine with as well?
When you let a foreign government run an active psyop campaign against your citizens, you're just begging for instability and chaos.
And how is it different than Dems calling Trump Hitler, regardless of how accurate it was? Should they also be tried for "propaganda"? And how about goverments claiming they're doing well, should they be tried for propaganda? How about the entire red scare propaganda? How about anti-arab propaganda? Putting someone on a trial for "propaganda" is a dangerous violation of free speech. If you can prove they've been lying, then at best they're at the same playing field as the government suing them, and in case of tiktok as far as I am aware there is no evidence that they were spreading any lies. It's just that they weren't censoring the genocide Israel commited in Gaza, unlike platforms aligned with USA, like Meta or Twitter. Which censorship was most definitely a propaganda, but instead of them it's tiktok that's being punished for not doing it? It's nonsense. Boosting negative commentary about foreign country is basic freedom of speech, and attempting to silence that feels very dictatorial. It's what China did with a lot of internet for spreading propaganda against them, don't you feel like removing Youtube access in China for making anti-chinese material available was bad for free speech? I wouldn't mind tiktok getting closed for spying on people, but it's obvious they don't want a precedent for that. Blocking propaganda? Bullshit.
As for me "being fine with" other peoples freedom of speech, I dislike what they had to say and I'd want them to be punished for lying, but I'd never advocate against them having option to speak. You end up living in a dictatorship by doing that. I'm not a free speech absolutist, by any stretch of imagination, but banning platforms for containing content casting bad light on you is going too far for me. Especially since there are much better reasons to do so.
What's the difference between Facebook / Meta selling my data to whoever, vs. TikTok harvesting it themselves?
There is no difference, neither should be allowed to do that. Person I replied to claimed the issue is chinese propaganda instead of any actual security risks.
I disagree. I think it's incredibly dangerous for a malevolent actor to control the media we consume and can erode the community from within.
Just look at fox news.
So in your view Fox News should be banned because they're propaganda machine for the right wing, calling out Dems for their faults and praising Reps for anything they did? Or because they're lying pieces of shit that helped manufacture a false narrative that eroded democracy and allowed fascists to get in power? Because, as far as I know, tiktok didn't do the later and it's the platform that got banned.
Oh yeah it's the latter. I'm not advocating for the tiktok ban at all, but I do think fox news is a malicious cancer.
In fact, because of fox news existence, I think foreign national propaganda engines are more important than ever. If the population is going to be manipulated for the gain of a few, at least have a lot of actors manipulating everyone so we have a chance of not letting one person control everyone.
They are assholes, sure... but are they wrong?
I mean, yeah? Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are inalienable rights, sure, but they're generally intended to extend to citizens. Not foreign governments.
There's a big difference between a Chinese citizen here on a green card going around saying they love China and a company running an active misinformation campaign on orders from their government.
It's no different than how the government tried to crack down on Russian election interference. Turns out, hostile nations running psyops campaigns is bad.
I agree that it's bad, and it should be forbidden... but with the whole US decisions that "corporations are people" and "money is speech", I think it's legally questionable.
I might grant questionable, but not super.
I think a large part of why it was a 9-0 decision was that it's not speech to run a social media site. It's commerce, plain as day. Congress has the authority to regulate commerce full stop. The fact that China is using that platform to spread misinformation, and then claiming that stopping them from doing so is a 1A violation is just a red herring.
"Money is speech" just means rich people can donate all the money they want to a politician. Not that you can run an otherwise unlawful business because "money is speech and free speech is a thing!"