The executive order doesn't outright ban the use of TikTok (the app), it just places a ban on "any transactions subject to the jurisdiction of the United States with ByteDance", which in essence makes it impossible for people to find the app on an App store. It's almost identical to the Huawei/ZTE executive orders. It's a bit like an economic sanction on a country, which may also include companies that engage in media/speech.
They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
Sure they can. Look at HIPAA, COPPA, government classification, etc. I could call a family member up at an intelligence agency and ask what kinds of stuff they're investigating, but they'd surely be committing a crime by sharing that information with me, regardless of whether or not money changed hands.
The other counterargument to this is that ByteDance only has commercial intentions with the data it gathers on users. It's not a non-profit trying to feed or clothe the needy, it exists purely as a commercial enterprise, meaning that any and all information they gather will either directly or indirectly used for commerce.
I am not against banning bytedance's commercial activity. But, the reasoning needs to make it clear that the app is not banned, sharing the app is not illegal and what is restricted is bytedance's ability to engage in commerce. You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them. You can revoke theie business license and ban commercial activity with them.
This technically isn't always true either. I write software for a company and even though it comes from my brain, I still don't own it and I can't share it. I'm sure in the case of TikTok, users probably don't own their data either, the company does.
> You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them.
What would be the point of ByteDance even keeping the app up if they can't monetize it? The act of users transmitting information inherently adds data to TikTok's database, which has financial value. It doesn't make sense for a company to just keep an app like that up and running while promising not to make money off of it. The compute costs alone must be enormous for an app like TikTok since they have to optimize and cache all of that video. Why would a business agree to keep operating while promising not to profit? That doesn't make sense to me.
But even if that were the case, you can ban sharing knowledge under obscenity clauses, national security clauses, or because it incite violence.
TikTok is being banned as a threat to national security, because having your preeminent communications tool run by a foreign government is inane, unless you are or want to become a colony of that government.
For example historically the US has banned books for being sexually obscene, demeaning to a particular group, or liable to foster communist sympathies.
> US advertisers can be banned from doing business with tiktok but it is a free app.
In addition, App Store providers can be banned from allowing ByteDance to submit it.
> They can ban book sales or a book reading service but storage, avaipability and free transfer of information cannot be banned.
The free transfer of software information is already "banned" through copyright law. Software piracy is technically simply the capital-free transfer of bits of data, and that can and is controlled by the US government.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
The argument is not whether they can ban someone from mailing you a copy of the communist manifest, it's whether they can ban an American retailer from receiving copies of it from a sanctioned supplier. That's what the executive order appears to be targeting.
Nobody cares about the source code. Everyone cares about sending data back to the CCP. If Tik Tok/ByteDance wants to stop being a tool of the CCP and engaging in the persecution of Uigher Muslims, then they can go back to offering us an app with funny dances.
> They can regulate commerce but for software and crypto they can't regulate the transfer of information,they can only regulate commercial activity with that information
Crypto exports are regulated.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter
Actually at one point sending pornography through the USPS WAS banned. Typically political speech gets stronger protections though.
> so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
The issue isn't spreading the communist manifesto. It's human rights abuses of a religious minority including forced sterilization - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/china-conducting-mass-steril...
I think you're argument breaks down here. I don't think that handimf over information to a foreign government is a right. I was unable to Google for a definitive answer, but maybe a more knowledgeable person could chime in. The US already has export restrictions on knowledge ( for example encryption ) to foreign governments.
And normally people on this site deride such things as ridiculous (and actively worked around bans on exporting encryption), but when they find out Big Bad China might see their dance videos and lip synching suddenly they're happy to crush the free exchange of information.
It's not just that China has peoples' dance videos.
The app has complete adoption by the teenage generation. When many high-profile hacks begin with simple social engineering, all it takes is blackmail attempts on the sons and daughters of diplomats and CEOs threatening to reveal/promote to friends either private or falsified(deep fake?) data/videos to get at least some percentage of compliance.
Of course we should protect encryption and be smart and diligent when protecting our liberties, but I'm scared of TikTok, and I don't think that fear is unjustified.
Don't sacrifice my liberty to alleviate your fears.
If we follow your logic let's equally apply the law and ban telegram,facebook/whatsapp/instagram,google and snapchat as well. And please,let the US cease all commerce with China if they are a hostile enemy government, let's stop financing them. Unless of course like always this is about american greed and not security. Injustice is not tolerable even if security is at stake. If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces. I have no reason to fear China more than a domestic political party that is eager to start race wars and concentration camps. The law must be fair and it must be applied equally. That is a fundamental concept where it's violation means invalidation and collapse of all legal and legitimate goverment and legal activity.
Don't be melodramatic. You sacrifice your liberty for the sake of security all the time, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
> You need to educate your fellow citizens or pressure appstore owners (google and apple) to delist tiktok.
This is an unconvincing solution because of the subversive nature of the power of TikTok. We already see that people brush this off as "not my problem. I don't care if China has my data".
You don't have to trust domestic parties to agree that there is a legitimate security threat from Chinese controlled TikTok which must be addressed.
> If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces.
This is ostensibly the point of the "clean network". Whether or not that particular solution is adequate or even appropriate remains to be seen, but it certainly seems aimed at exactly that problem.
This isn't what they even care about. It's all the telemetry and spying the app does, like copying your clipboard consistently (seriously how this is allowed anymore by iOS or Android is beyond me). What if you selected some proprietary information and later your kid opens up TikTok cause they love using your phone, and voila some proprietary information is copied on there, going to who knows where. Something like TikTok makes corporate espionage quite possible given its popularity. I can't imagine what other things the app is doing.
Of course, just as with tobacco there are huge American companies which are going to oppose this sort of transparency. And of course rolling out teaching standards requires that some standardization for app privacy exist in the first place, so I don't expect this to happen fast (if it could ever happen at all).
1. Libel
2. Slander
3. Treason
4. Certain threats / incitement to violence (like hiring a hit man)
5. Obscenity
Signal isn't sponsored by foreign governments, so it is immune to this sort of attack. It looks like Briar has German funding. The encrypted and decentralized nature of both of those apps makes them much lower concerns for espionage and (election) interference, and of course neither provides content directly from foreign governments, so they cannot be called into question for campaign interference.
Signal and Briar were examples. Ok, telegram, it's russian so should it be banned? Espionage has to di with state and national secrets. A foreign government spying on americans with their knowledge and consent is not espionage. How is facebook literally recording without consent not a bigger issue? Please ban facebook before tiktok. Google and Amazon have home assistants spying on americans which is magnitudes of order worse thab tiktok!
This is the thing you have to undetstand, bytedance (tiktok's creator) being cozy with ccp is not a whole lot different than facebook and zuckergerg being in bed with the trump admin or Google being in bed with obama admin ,except China is an ocean many nukes away from doing actual harm to americans and your own government is literally facilitating the death of your own citizens as we speak! Ban facebook,google and amazon because they are helping tear apart america while you're at it!
This is pure politics, sacrificing your right in fear of a boogeyman in China because the boogeyman here is on your side. You don't get to do that, if you disagree with the bill of rights have a constitutional convention and change it.
I get to to communicate with tiktok or even the chinese government if I want. And if I share my private life with them that's my right too. The government has no authority to prevent free excercise of my rights even if they don't like it.
Right now and in 2016 facebook was used to manipulate elections in the US. Shut it down because thay clearly is a national security risk if you truly believe the government policing what private information you share or consume is a good idea.
Those things are definitely used for speech, and banning them all would likely be an issue. But banning a brand of pens because you don't trust the chemicals in them as safe or routers because you're concerned about potential spy ware, seems reasonable.
In that sense, TikTok is just one of many alternatives and if the motivation isn't to regulate speech, it feels like it could fit with other bans that seem reasonable to me.
I'd assume the claim here would be that it presents national security risk, though of course I think that's probably not why the ban is really happening, and it makes sense for it to be challenged.
Yeah, but they lack the authority. National security does not override anyone's rights. They don't get to do this regardless if their intent. This sets a precedent where if they can claim any entity is a national security risk they can restrict communication with that entitiy. Totalitarian regimes do this exact thing when they ban certain social media or VPNs!
It's diffrent from banning a brand of pens because you're banning commercial activity and the danger is a chemical not speech. Here you're sayiny speech itself is too dangerous to be allowed. A clear line preventing the government from doing this for a reason.
Banning the pen is legitimate as knowingly harming people is a crime.
Banning the router isn't the same. At most they are guilty of false advertising, and even that can probably be made legal in the license provided. Besides, I may have reasons to want a router with spyware on it.
The same would apply to TikTok, but I think they're trying to say it's also "aiding our enemies" making it akin to a light form of treason.
It looks like the USA don't like a social network they can't control the algorithm.
This statement confused me, probably because I'm not from the US and am missing some cultural dogma/context. But the way I think about it, "rights" are not encoded in the laws of physics. They are social constructs. Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
There's a long history of reasoning (i.e. logic) from first principles how to best establish communities, for example Rousseau's 1762 work, The Social Contract.
Some key arguments that Rousseau expounds:
* force does not create right; we are only obligated to obey legitimate powers
* everyone is free (because we each give up the same rights and have the same duties imposed, e.g. around property rights)
* absurd for someone to surrender freedom for slavery
There are underlying commonalities between Rousseau's work and intellectual artifacts from other cultures, such as "reciprocity" expressed by Confucius in Analects: "do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you". This concept of reciprocity is also echoed in the Christian doctrine of the golden rule.
> Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
Do you not think that there are universal human rights?
For example, those enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
I know attempts have been made to come up with "universal rights". But to my point, not everyone agrees with them. For example, the convention on children's rights has not been ratified by the US.
The poster I first responded to, has since clarified that he meant something like US law working as a blacklist of what is forbidden (as opposed to a whitelist of what is allowed). So the discussion about universal rights was a bit of a red herring, sorry.
"Rights" do not really make sense if you're the only human around.
But regardless of origin, a constitution defines what the country is made up of. Constitutional rights are a contract where the government is allowed to govern and secure the people if and only if they secure those rights and follow the articles of the constitution.
depending on what country you are from, you could be from a country that has a set of civil laws, as opposed to a country with a set of common laws.
common law countries tend to have enumerated rights that the government cannot take away, while civil law countries tend to have rights that because of the way that particular society is built, you have these rights.
The u.s. is the common-law state because of our declaration of Independence and Constitution that speak about how all men are created equal (before God) and thus since the government rules by the consent of the governed, the laws eumerated in things like the Bill of Rights are things that are just off limits to the US government, with limited scope contextual restrictions to non-negotiable absolute rights depending on their wordings.
The idea that our rights come from god, not the government, is enshrined in the founding documents of the US, and the idea has been discussed in philosophy for centuries before that. It's part of why US conservatives get so bent out of shape when progressives say things like "everyone has a right to healthcare".
I agree it doesn't make much sense. It's also worth noting that 75% of the men who signed that document owned slaves.
Do you also think you have a right to not wear a mask during a pandemic or not wear a seatbelt while driving?
This is simple exchange of unprivileged information between an individual and an organization (foreign or domestic).
You lost me here. That spying can have disastrous results for security and economic well-being of USA (daughter of top Intel engineer or President's top adviser for example is wiretapped by CCP) so the state has extremely legitimate reasons to watch out for the best of all. Our Congress and our courts decide if the President overstepped the line, not China.
The clock is tiking....tik-tok will get due process, meaning lawyers will be able to represent them and that's it. Maybe the whole case will be sealed and the judge can hear classified info privately.
Your courts and congress will decide if he stepped over the line. But if they fail to do so, you lose a ton of rights. He then gets to ban "antifa" apps and democrats get to ban "alt right" russian apps. A supreme court precedent can't be challenged in court when they apply the same logic for something else. This isn't about tik tok, this is about every other app the US government can't controp or arm twist because they are not based on the US.
Americans can mount free 4k cameras with hd audio in everyroom in their house that streams directly to china snd they cannot be stopped from doing so based on the fact that the government does not approve of the information being transmitted.
What does China want to know from millions of Americans that work in engineering, military, universities, politics? See the difference. Like China cares that its company was fined by FTC for $25 million for not respecting privacy
If they can ban tik tok, they can ban signal or briar because those also might send your encrypted data overseas or because their use among "violent" protestors is a risk. How about VPN apps that siphon your personal data to china and russia! Haha
Here's the thing, US bigtech complies (in secret) with US intel community just like tik tok complies with CCP's MSS. Matter of fact, I happen to know with certainty and with first hand accounts that the US intel community offensively uses american made apps and services to spy against naturalized law abiding americans on american soil just as they would with a foreigner working for the CCP in China.
You might say, China bans US media companies so US should as well. And I will say to you that's absolute nonsense. China is a totalitarian orwelian nightmare state and the US is supposed to be a beacon of liberty and freedom in the world. The US can ban tiktok's usage amongst US government and military and anyone that does business with them. But by what right do they get to restrict communication, an unregulated non-financial interaction between americans and anyone else?
If americans want to be spied on by China in exchange for being able to use tiktok it's their right and this activity is beyond the reaches of any elected government. Even if there is a law allowing congress or the president to ban tiktok, this law is overriden by the bill of rights that restricts the government from making laws that constrain speech and communication between citizens and anyone,and that guarantees tiktok due process and a trial before being found of any wrongdoing. Congress can however restrict commerce, as in financial transaction and for profit activity with tiktok and advertisers, what congress or trump have no authority to do is to tell americans and tiktok they cannot communicate with each other. Freedom of speech is meaningless if no one is allowed to listen to you.
This needs to be done right. Do not throw away your rights by creating a precedent set by the supreme court that lets government restrict your speech. These sneaky bastards will always worm their way into slowly taking away rights from the people in order to preserve their social order.
I don't like tiktok and if you care to go back far enough into my posting history you will see how much I hate the CCP.
What is given can be taken away (if your right to communicate with a foreign entity is given by the government). And if they can ban one app,banning others is a matter of legal mental gymnastics.