TikTok on the clock, and the party might stop
Drop-topping, playing our favorite CDs
So Amtrak Joe finally did it. The TikTok “ban” was signed into law this last week as part of a larger bill for foreign aid. Here’s what it means:
ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, must divest itself of the app or face penalty.
They have 9 months (with a discretionary extra 3 months if there is demonstrably a deal in the works as the deadline approaches)
There’s a lot of nuance and detail I’m omitting here, but this is the basic idea. So what happens now?
TikTok is going to challenge the constitutionality of this bill on First Amendment grounds, asserting that the ban amounts to government restriction on free speech for the millions of people in the US who use the app.
The government’s case is basically on national security grounds. The legislators assert that the app poses a distinct risk to the welfare of the US because of its connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
What do I think? What’s actually going to happen?
Well for one, I am no legal professional. I’m also not a journalist. Casey Newton, a journalist who runs Platformer, asked multiple legal scholars about their expectations of TikTok’s case. You might be able to read that here: https://www.platformer.news/tiktok-ban-bill-senate-legal-challenge-first-amendment/. Their answers mostly amounted to the following: The forced sale of TikTok is almost certainly unconstitutional not just by the letter of the law, but also by precedent. Here’s Newton:
The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can’t ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont vs. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the postmaster general to detain “communist political propaganda” sent through the mail. The Post Office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered, in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech.
If Congress can’t even require people to fill out a form to receive propaganda, the logic goes, it seems even less likely that the Supreme Court would find that Congress could ban TikTok over the still unsupported claims that it is deliberately amplifying pro-China or pro-Hamas content.
If the government is so worried about national security and the data of American citizens being manipulated and attained by foreign adversaries, well then they should institute a federal data security law?
When? Well how about when Cambridge Analytica, a British company, was able to scoop the data of American Facebook users and sell it to Russia? Maybe that would have been a good time?
Anyway, I could go on and on about this whole thing and the hypocrisy at its root. Here’s what I think in way fewer words than I want to write:
The ban should have never been passed in the first place, and the US government could do a lot more than this cosmetic political point scoring to actually fix the issues at hand.
arachne music corner
Today, I want to feature one of the greatest NPR Tiny Desk Concerts ever performed: