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TikTok's CEO agrees to testify before Congress for the first time in March:
As Congress prepares to vote on a nationwide TikTok ban next month, it looks like that ban may already be doomed to fail. The biggest hurdle likely won't be mustering enough votes, but drafting a ban that doesn't conflict with measures passed in the 1980s to protect the flow of ideas from hostile foreign nations during the Cold War.
These decades-old measures, known as the Berman amendments, were previously invoked by TikTok creators suing to block Donald Trump's attempted TikTok ban in 2020. Now, a spokesperson for Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Ars that these measures are believed to be the biggest obstacle for lawmakers keen on blocking the app from operating in the United States.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that lawmakers' dilemma in enacting a ban would be finding a way to block TikTok without "shutting down global exchanges of content—or inviting retaliation against US platforms and media." Some lawmakers think that's achievable by creating a narrow carve-out for TikTok in new legislation, but others, like McCaul, think a more permanent solution to protect national security interests long-term would require crafting more durable and thoughtful legislation that would allow for bans of TikTok and all apps beholden to hostile foreign countries.
[...] Back in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to empower the president to impose sanctions on and oversee trade with hostile nations. The plan was to prevent average American citizens from assisting US enemies, but the law troubled publishers doing business with book authors and movie makers based in hostile nations. Those concerns led Congressman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) to propose an amendment in 1988, which passed, exempting "information and informational materials" from IEEPA and blocking presidents from regulating these materials.
As technology evolved, in 1994, another IEEPA amendment specifically exempted electronic media, leading to today, when everything from a tweet to a TikTok would be free from presidential regulation under the so-called Berman amendments. How this prevents Congress from passing a new law remains unclear, but the WSJ reports that lawmakers are hesitant to draft legislation limiting TikTok if that could threaten those protections.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 02 2023, @09:02PM (2 children)
Regulating commercial speech is perfectly fine, and has been upheld over and over by the Supreme Court.
All websites that meet some common threshold need to be held to the SAME standards.
The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on national origin. If the Chinese owners of TikTok are here running their US subsidiary within the laws of the land you don't really get to put extra laws on them just because they're Chinese.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 03 2023, @03:35AM
The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on national origin. If the Chinese owners of TikTok are here running their US subsidiary within the laws of the land you don't really get to put extra laws on them just because they're Chinese.
That's kind of the point I was trying to make, though there is a difference between ethnicity and nationality which is being ignored and the confusion is being used as a distraction. The whole matter of spying, advertising, and surveillance is also a distraction from the main events of health and mass manipulation.
Instead, the wannabe legislators seem to be objecting to Tiktok not because of the many harms it perpetrates upon a whole generation of non-Chinese, including spying, advertising, and censorship, but mainly because it is the CCP taking those actions. They appear to be setting up a big, theatrical fuss so that they can pretend to have done something while in reality when the dust settles they will have a legal go-ahead for further spying, advertising, and censorship.
Their avoidance of the topic of the many harms Tiktok does to physical and mental health is telling. Physical health is affected, as seen from the constant stream of numerous and severe self-inflicted injuries [nypost.com] goaded on by the app. That is not limited to just eating detergent. The harm to mental health from Tiktok [salon.com] is so severe that even the US Surgeon General has noticed and spoken up. You'd think though that people would get the hint that the harm is weaponized from day one when the CCP prevents Bytedance from doing the same thing in China.
Notice that Bytedance limits teenagers to less than 40 minutes of access per day in China and, furthermore, during those 40 minutes the kids are shown only educational videos, especially science experiments. The information about Bytedance is out there. Yet the wannabe legislators give every appearance of actively avoiding taking the known facts into account. Even the media, both mainstream and fringe, have largely covered for Bytedance by ignoring the problem. So far, only CBS 60 Minutes covered the intentional nature Tiktok [cbs.com] and its harms. The wannabe legislators and media combined can't all be that stupid, but perhaps maybe they are. However, to me, the simplest explanation is that they wish to make a big, theatrical fuss so that they can pretend to have done something while actually creating a legal go-ahead for further spying, advertising, and mass manipulation of behavior and opinion.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by rpnx on Saturday February 04 2023, @08:30AM
Except what you just said isn't true and the Supreme Court held in Reed and other cases the framework for content based speech restrictions. There are limited exceptions but they are much narrower than you believe them to be.