The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to either sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States.
Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352-65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year.
I don’t understand the argument that this limits free speech. Anything that people post on Tik Tok can also be posted on competing social media sites. How is free speech affected by this?
It’s funny that the only app being banned, is the app that young people used to have a dramatic effect on American politics recently, first by blocking the red wave, then by tanking democratic polling thanks to their support for genocide.
It’s funny that Twitter or Facebook, which is absolutely full of outside influence on America, isn’t banned. The Russian and Chinese bot networks can live forever there, that’s fine.
Silly of you to assume that that is about end user’s free speech and not the “free speech” of a company to release a product to market.
In all seriousness, I think hostile foreign governments have an interest in destabilizing the public discourse of other countries. I get the memes comparing data collection between TikTok and American tech firms. But the fact remains that the US government can reign in foreign influence of domestic social media, where as it has absolutely no control over foreign social media. The fact that border protection never extended to the digital space is in hindsight kind of strange. It’s also completely asinine to expect any sort of free speech on a platform subject to an authoritarian government.
That’s not true at all. If we make a law about content on social media then TikTok would need to abide by that just the same as domestic companies.
Because American sites don’t show it to their audiences.
And literally ban it.
There’s a reason TikTok is far more Pro Palestinian than Facebook or Twitter.
Also it’s as free as China allows. The delusion of freedom is laughabley absurd