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TikTok ticking away

The New Neo Posted on by

The TikTok divestiture bill has passed the House. It’s bipartisan, and Ace explains why:

The bill does not outlaw TikTok or shut it down. What it does is required the ChiCom owner of TikTok, a state-controlled entity called ByteDance, to sell the US part of the operation (I believe) to some non-China-controlled entity within (I think) six months or so.

If the ChiComs do not sell, then TikTok gets shut down.

But they have plenty of time to sell. …

Well, there’s no doubt that Red China is using TikTok both for purposes of espionage as well as a really vicious demoralization campaign against America’s children. China has its own version of TikTok, but that platform encourages pro-social activities, studying, being dutiful to one’s parents, etc.

The American version of TikTok is 24/7 transgender conversion therapy.

Oh, and the Chinese version of TikTok imposes a time limit on usage, so that children do not spend their entire f***ing young lives endlessly scrolling through crap content. …

On the other hand, of course, the left has agreed to the divestiture bill for TikTok because they have the Real Prize in mind: Twitter. They would like to pass the same bill to force Elon Musk to sell Twitter to representatives of the Democrat Party.

Republicans can object and say that the TikTok bill was only justified because it was owned by a hostile foreign nation, doing the bidding of that hostile foreign nation’s intelligence services.

Democrats will say, no, the action was justified because TikTok “causes harm” and nothing causes more harm than Pepe the Frog memes on Twitter. They will say that Elon Musk is much, much more dangerous than Red China. …

On the other other hand … the right constantly argues that “we can’t do x because that will free the left to do something horrible,” but this argument has been proven hollow: The left is doing horrible things whether we grant a precedent they can claim to justify it or not.

And the libertarians are in la-la-land about all of this:

This is a huge deal. TikTok is heavily influencing the youth of our country in particular, and it is under Chinese control. This fight about TikTok is emblematic of the entire question of the pernicious influence of social media, whether to go about controlling it, and if so how to control it and who should be controlling it.

Comments

TikTok ticking away — 35 Comments

  1. I don’t see what rationale could be used from this to shut down X. TikTok is owned by Chinese Communists closely linked to the CCP — as everything is over there. Elon Musk is an American citizen, resident in the USA.

    I hear that Rumble is interested in making an offer to buy TikTok in the US and operate it.

    The best preventive for social media mental health damage in children is for parents to refuse to provide smart phones for their underage kids.

  2. Kate:

    That won’t work. Kids can access the sites on friends’ phones. Also, if the kid has a job or savings the kid can get a phone and service on it fairly cheaply and keep it all from their parents. As far as I know, there’s no rule about age for smartphone purchase.

  3. I realize, Neo, but parents should at least try. I have a friend who teaches computer science in a local high school. She requires all students to leave their phones near the door and retrieve them when class is over. I’ve seen reports about school systems which require this system-wide. Grades go up and in-school violence goes down.

  4. Kate:

    Parents definitely should try. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that it will take care of the problem.

  5. I suspect most young adults depend on the phones their parents fund.

    Also it would be inconvenient to have several different accounts accessed on one phone. And potentially your friend could post from your account, I don’t think most girls want other girls posting from their account.

  6. Don:

    My point is that there ways to work around it, not that every child will use those ways. But where there’s a will there’s a way, even if using someone else’s phone or buying one’s own phone is hardly ideal. Older kids can earn money and buy their own.

  7. Yeah. THIS is a big deal.
    The First Amendment protects speech, but not the freedom of foreign states to propagandise against our interests.

    Whether or not it will work to defeat the subversive and corrupting algorithm it follows is anyone’s guess.

    Forever, it seems, foreign hostile nations were prohibited from owning US newspapers, radio stations, and TV.

    How is Tic-Toc any different?

  8. I am conflicted about this. During the Cold War, the Soviets spent huge amounts of money and effort jamming US and other Western radio transmissions. I don’t think the US ever jammed any Soviet transmissions. Now, maybe this was just because the Soviets were transmitting on short wave and relatively few Americans owned short wave receivers…but they weren’t particularly expensive for anyone who wanted one, and anyhow, if the Soviet had somehow managed to cover the US with Radio Moscow transmissions, say, at the low end of the ordinary AM band, then I still don’t think we would have engaged in jamming. Largely a matter of cultural self-confidence as well as free speech traditions.

    Now, the situations aren’t equivalent, because radio is a one-way medium whereas social media is bidirectional in that it allows data to be gathered on the user.

    Still, it makes me nervous. I can imagine a future Democrat administration banning access to Israeli websites because they want to protect the Palestinians from genocide, or banning websites from some other country to protect Americans from medical misinformation.

  9. Anything that passes with bipartisan support makes me suspicious. Personally, I’d rather see Congress pass legislation barring China from owning land or property in the US.

  10. yes I don’t trust them to give a regime, which is redolent of dezinforma, the power to determine what is what,

  11. David Foster,

    Within days of the Russian incursion into Ukraine all U.S. carriers dropped RT. I was watching a fair amount of RT between the incursion and it being dropped. I found it very useful to see and hear Russian propaganda first hand. It’s good to see how your enemy operates, out in the open.

  12. David +Foster
    I don’t think the US ever jammed any Soviet transmissions

    I once listened to Radio Moscow on a shortwave radio. The announcer had the accent of a native English speaker. He was giving answers to questions from listeners. One questioner was displeased with layoffs at US radio stations, and wondered if personnel at Soviet radio stations had job security. The Radio Moscow announcer replied that there was job security at Soviet radio stations. He went on, “in the four radio stations in Moscow…” A city of 100,000 in the US could, at the time, have four radio stations. Moscow had what- 10 million inhabitants? More job insecurity in US radio compared to Soviet radio, but many more jobs.

    After that, I decided there was no more reason to listen to Radio Moscow.

  13. There are always work arounds, but parents would solve most of the problem by not providing phones. Like many things, you don’t need a 100% solution.

  14. RT and Al Jazeera on balance have a very crisp look, patterned after the BBC, in Miami, there was a station run by Castro sympathizers, Radio Progreso, that was some serious drek, is it greater drek than MSNBC, thats a close call,

  15. “Thomas Massie Says Bill To Ban TikTok Is ‘Actually A Trojan Horse'”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u9tIZ764MU

    “Americans have the right to view information. We don’t need to be protected by the government from information.
    Some of us just don’t want the President picking which apps we can put on our phones or which websites that we can visit.
    We don’t think that’s appropriate, we also think it’s dangerous to give the president that kind of power.
    To give him the power to decide what Americans can see on their phones and their computers. To give him that sort of
    discretion. We also think is dangerous. Now people say that this will only apply to TikTok or maybe another company that pops up just like TikTok. But the bill is written so broadly that the President could abuse that discretion and include other companies that aren’t just social media companies.
    That aren’t you know as some people would believe controlled by Foreign adversaries. Again we’re giving the President that discretion, to decide whether it is controlled by a foreign adversary.”

    Apparently, there’s no provision in the bill that would prevent Biden or any democrat pResident from unilaterally declaring any ‘communication’ to be ‘misinformation’ or simply ‘dis’information i.e. a truth that must not be communicated. Get used to it; 1 + 1 equals 3 or 5 or 7… whatever then best serves the narrative.

  16. Never enlist government to do the job of parenting. I agree with Massie on this one – the precedent empowers the very administration that has been caught red-handed conspiring with American-based social media to silence individual voices in an attempt to create a society ruled by its propaganda, and now is being empowered to do the very same thing with entire platforms, on a discretionary basis. This first example uses China as the bad guy. But villains are carefully crafted all the time via propaganda, and can be made up from whole cloth. Who’s next? Twitter/X? Truth Social? Rumble? Name your poison.

  17. I don’t see what rationale could be used from this to shut down X.

    The worry is that “The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution”.

  18. TikTok is heavily influencing the youth of our country in particular, and it is under Chinese control.

    I’m inclined to think TikTok is more a symptom (of what our own progressives have perpetrated on our youth) than a cause. I get that the spying is a problem and maybe reason enough to act, but it won’t make much difference so long as our education system is dominated by leftist indoctrination and exposing children to warped ideas about sex from an early age.

    There’s also the problem that this could be the camel’s nose under the tent for Democrats to go after X or Rumble or any other social media platform they don’t like on some phony pretext like “election interference.”

  19. But they have plenty of time to sell. …

    That’s the rub. They have plenty of time to defeat the intent of the bill, even if it passes, by many different means. Tik-Toc is clearly a malevolent influence controlled by an enemy state. Trump should demand it be shut down immediately, or he will do so on day one.

  20. I see TikTok as being the same as Huawei. Both are very dangerous, and we’ve been slow to see the truth about Tik Tok. Same with the land purchases and other inroads the Chinese have made. They are killing our citizens with fentanyl, they have spies everywhere, especially in our colleges. They’re buying up farmland near military installations, and Tik Tok is both social poison for the young and a data collector for the CCP.

    I would prefer that it be bought by some company like Rumble, that could turn it into a positive site and make money for an American company while competing with Facebook and Google.

    Let’s face it, the social media world has to be reformed, and that means putting guard rails in the form of some regulations. Items that need to be addressed:
    1.Online perverts trolling for victims.
    2. Unlimited data collection must be reined in. The users have become the product. Selling our data is a big business now.
    3. Grifts, scams, and outright theft needs to be controlled.
    4. Government collusion with the companies needs to be stopped.
    5. There should be a way to sue the social media companies for damages done to children or the elderly with their practices.

    What should not be regulated, (except for porn, which should have it’s own dark, restricted corner) is speech.

    The regulatory body would be made up of non-governmental experts on technology, psychology, law, media businesses, etc. Serious people who will be the adults in the room.

    Yeah, it will take a law to set this up, but it could and should be done.

  21. What is unique (if anything) about Tik Tok? Couldn’t the content creators move to X or Facebook? Obvious I never go on Tik Tok, but I do see cat videos (or is it dog videos or cute kid videos) people share on Facebook.

  22. I don’t trust Communist China.
    I trust “Biden” even less.
    Oh right. “Biden”’s an ally of Communist China….
    So no. What I really should have said is that I TRUST “Biden” to solemnly do “his” damned best to destroy the country.
    – – – – – – – –
    “…[China is] killing our citizens with fentanyl…”
    BUT, it should be noted, with the active assistance, encouragement and participation of President Fentanyl-Tranq and “his” merrye band of psychopaths…
    (Gosh, now why might “he” want to do something like that…?)

  23. Social media is just bad. As always it boils down to culture. Or lack thereof. In my Eastern Orthodox parish the evils of social media are well known. The parents either ban it, or, maintain tight control. The kids (8 to 17) are entirely on board. I ask my non Orthodox friends and I get “Huh” or “they’ll get it somehow”. This example, as tiny as it is, reinforces, for me, the criticality of having a strong and vibrant culture. It blows my mind the parents abdicate control over something that, literally, rewires your child’s brain.

  26. to sell the US part of the operation (I believe) to some non-China-controlled entity

    In other words, another fake bill that does nothing. The CCP will still control TikTok, and the US part could still be in foreign (but not Chinese) hands.

    Now you know why it passed with so much Dem support.

    Also the bill gives the government more power to dictate what’s allowed online, if you bother to read it. I thought we didn’t like how they made Twitter and Facebook filter content the government didn’t like but now we’re cheering them putting into law?

    Maybe we shouldn’t believe the narrative the media feeds us.

  27. Stories are coming out saying that this isn’t so much about China now, but about which politicians have investments in which tech companies and which tech moguls have investments in which politicians.

    There was a lot to be said for forcing a sale of TikTok to a US company (and carefully looking for any secret tricks implanted in the software). Now we have to worry about the secret tricks implanted in the legislation.
    __________

    I miss shortwave. Everything has gone over to the internet. It’s less expensive for the national broadcasters, who don’t have to keep massive transmitters working, but more expensive for us, the end users, who have to pay for the internet.

    Also, using the internet now doesn’t feel like being an explorer anymore, but there was always a little of that feeling with shortwave. There was always something popping up somewhere on the dial. Maybe it was the adventure of physically turning into a new territory at one end or the other of the dial, or maybe it was the magic of radio, which leaves much to the imagination.

  29. J.J.’s 3/13 comment summarizes the situation quite well.
    Neo’s objection that kids will just end-run their parents is a cop-out against full parental control of their offspring.

  30. Cicero:

    You are misreading and/or misunderstanding my point, which is that although parents should indeed control whether or not their kids get cellphones and/or what sort of block are on phones if they do decide their kids should have them, the reality of which parents also should be aware is that this does not necessarily entirely control the situation because kids can be quite creative about having access in other ways.

    Unless parents go full Rapunzel and lock offspring in a tower completely away from the world, there is only an illusion of FULL control. That should not stop parents from doing what they can realistically do to protect their children.

  31. I’ve been making the distinction between “small l” libertarians and “large L” Libertarians for at least 35 years. I’ve rarely seen anything that the Libertarians favor that I agree with, yet any examination of my positions on government shows that I am strongly libertarian in viewpoint.

    Libertarians are not even close to being in lockstep with libertarians. Libertarians are to libertarians what PostModern Liberals are to Classical Liberals. They are primarily the lunatic nutjob wing.

    =====
    BTW, the really fun nightmare for Dems is clearly obvious:

    Elon Musk buys TikTok.

    I will be laughing my ass off. 😀

  32. There seems like an awful lot of uncertainty for a bill that’s maybe two pages. Could this bill be used to go after Twitter? Only if more than 20% of it is owned by people or corporations from a ‘foreign adversary nation,’ an existing term of art.

    The ‘foreign adversary nation’ list appears to be controlled by the Secretary of Commerce; there are sources the Secretary is supposed to use to determine what nations belong on the list, but adding (or removing) an entry seems to be, ultimately, at the Secretary’s discretion.

    Current entries: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Maduro (but, uniquely, not a generic Venezuelan government.)

    This likely keeps Rumble mostly clear, too, since Canada seems unlikely to get the ‘foreign adversary nation’ label.

    It’s worth pointing out that the bill doesn’t actually address the problems people have with TikTok; nothing about hoovering up data, nor anything about manipulating the algorithm to promote certain unsavory ideas.

    In an attempt to prevent venue shopping, the bill can only be challenged in DC court. Which is, on the one hand, kind of a good idea, in principle. In practice, of course, the DC court is the swampiest of swamp creatures, especially worrying when tied into the hot new trend of state supreme courts (Hawaii) and even circuit courts (Fourth) deciding they can overturn Supreme Court precedent they don’t like.

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