X media controlled by X doesn't mean other media is not accessible. I'm all for local media (of a significant size) not having foreign influence as long as you can have access to foreign media. It's actually awesome to hear about your country from something quite remote, like for example Al Jazeera. It puts things in perspective.

In the age of the internet, what's the difference between local media and foreign media?

If I live in Boise, Idaho, and there is a Japanese media company reporting on Boise, Idaho new under boise-idaho-news.com, for anyone interested in Boise, Idaho... you catch my drift.

Broadcast TV is going the way of the dinosaur.

Something like an effective TikTok ban would presume a centralized firewall or ISP filtering or similar.

As a footnote: A lot of my ideas here center on cash. I personally think of free speech as an individual right and not a corporate (or governmental / organizational) one. But I don't want to bias the discussion with my own ideas here.

"X media controlled by [private companies based in] X" has obvious antipatterns too, it creates oligarchs and tests how pure govts are abut enforcing competition legislation viz. takeovers and monopolies, also some markets have less $ than others. Consider Rupert Murdoch of Fox/Sky started out as a newspaper baron in Australia in the 1960s, bought US and UK titles, took over the UK tabloid industry in the 1980s (without becoming a UK citizen) and in return sold media favors to govts from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, then became a US citizen in 1985 and expanded his empire to Fox/StarTV. Murdoch has been kingmaker for deciding who gets elected leader in multiple continents for 4+ decades now, also for selling the Iraq invasion to the US/UK/Australian publics.

This is why media ownership legislation has to put limits on both foreign ownership and monopolies. It's interesting to watch FB deny the blatant reality that it's a media company not just a technology company [0], since to admit the obvious would trigger oversight. US Congress is dancing around eventually having to legislate for that, on FB, YT, TikTok, Twitter/X et al.

[0]: "Is Facebook a Media Company? That's Not Up to Mark Zuckerberg" https://www.fromdayone.co/stories/2020/6/26/is-facebook-a-me...

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that US media should be owned by Americans, but I do wonder if it makes sense to allow foreigners to have ownership if their own countries don’t allow the same kinds of rights as well. Bringing China up, I don’t really see why Chinese media should be allowed more access to American markets when they don’t reciprocate.

So the law would be that any country that has another country's media stations operating with in their country will then be allowed to have their media organizations operating in the first country? That sounds complicated and schizophrenic.

So every country has to maintain a list of countries that have some sort of quasi-official news regulation agency that says who's a news agency and not are not and where they're operating?

Just the idea sounds too dumb to believe.

Yes, there typically has to be reciprocity; this is what closed off the world's media throughout the entire duration of the Cold War, and is the paradigm under which China (and Russia to an extent) still operate. It's why RFERL, originally a pro-American propaganda radio broadcast targeted at Eastern Bloc and communist countries, was created, and why you could go to jail for listening to it in the USSR. Actually, currently, you still can (in Russia under their wartime laws).

It wasn't and still isn't legal to run an unregulated foreign-owned news bureau in basically any country. Social media is enmeshed with current events / news so it falls under like jurisdiction.

"Schizo" applies here as there is a definite schism between countries in the world and always has been. Try operating a HAM radio around Florida/Cuba and you'll find the southern neighbor has jammed (I believe) most radio news coming from the US.

In general, reciprocity works well across a broad range of international relations, (visas, tariffs, mutual defence/non-aggression/..., and otherwise).

As an idea, it's not "too dumb to believe."

Indeed, it's one of the places the US' draconian visa policies often come back to bite it. If you're travelling to any developing country with reciprocity on a US passport, you can expect to be treated horribly.

It's a difficult problem to consider, given that everyone speaks freely in global forums, and you end up with cultural exchange on an individual level... but you also have to think geopolitically.

A country is free to drop bombs on itself (the US does this regularly at test ranges)

A country is _not_ free to drop bombs on other countries... that's war.

If your country is not in control of its territory, it is not a country. It's some other country, the one that's in control of the territory.

If your country is not in control of its own media, then some other country is. And that country will use that power to its advantage, including destroying your country.

You have to use military superiority (and of course diplomacy, but it's backed by force) to keep other countries from freely dropping bombs on your country whenever they like.

You use customs, surveillance and barricades to control the flow of goods, people, capital across your borders - and if you don't, you don't control your borders, someone else does. Are you really the government of this territory, or is it in fact your neighbour?

You use licensing, regulators, standards, media ownership rules, etc. to hold your own broadcasters accountable for what they transmit to people, and also to clamp down on propaganda broadcasts controlled by other countries. You _used_ to be able to see Russia Today (RT) on regular TV, but since it acted as the mouthpiece of Russia, insisting Russia's not at war with Ukraine, etc., it was banned. If it were to start being independent of Russia and start reporting the truth, it would have a chance of being unbanned.

The great difficulty of social media is that it's not even "a country" operating it, it's usually "a corporation" (in the case of TikTok, China exerts an oversized influence on the company running the service, much more than the US exerts on Twitter or Russia exerts on Telegram, so we're mostly back to "a country" is running TikTok specifically)... and while the individuals on social media networks are (to some extent) real people with individual opinions, the specific opinions _allowed_ on these networks are controlled by that corporation. And users of those networks really just want to see things they've subscribed to, in the order of posting, but instead those networks are flexing their power over the user and pushing recommendations at their eyeballs, ultimately making themselves arbiters of what's popular, what's spreading, what ideas are being pushed. And that's horrendous for any country, in the same way that letting another country control your media is horrendous. If Elon Musk were to say "let's all have a knife fight in the middle of your city, wouldn't that be cool!" and have that appear in every Twitter user's timeline... I suspect a non-zero number of knife fights would break out across the world. That's _power_, and it's power that nobody in your country has a say in.

We can't even necessarily _stop_ this cross-cultural contamination... in the UK we talk about idiots who want to "plead the fifth" (we're not the USA, we don't have a "fifth amendment", we have a right to silence), and one of our cringiest moments was British protestors chanting "don't shoot me" to unarmed British police. Those protestors were totally filled with USian brainworms. This is happening because one of our biggest problems is US cultural hegemony steamrollering over our own. Our citizens are engaging primarily with US media, US-owned services like Youtube, and US controlled social media networks (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) and they're exposed to an outsized number of US-based English speakers with their US-centric opinions.

Your country has a problem if masses of its citizens are more au fait with another country's culture, laws and societal norms than they are with their own.

It's swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, I do admire the USA's commitment to freedom of speech, and projects like Wikipedia benefit from being hosted there, because the people in control of it then use that legal freedom to try and remain open, uncensored and neutral. But I can't say the same for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Apple and so on.