TikTok sues to block prospective US app ban
(www.cnn.com)
from Wilshire@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 07 May 2024 16:29
https://lemmy.world/post/15132518
from Wilshire@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 07 May 2024 16:29
https://lemmy.world/post/15132518
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
TikTok sued Tuesday to block a US law that could force a nationwide ban of the popular app, following through on legal threats the company issued after President Joe Biden signed the legislation last month.
The court challenge sets up a historic legal battle, one that will determine whether US security concerns about TikTok’s links to China can trump the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million US users.
If it loses, TikTok could be banned from US app stores unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the app to a non-Chinese entity by mid-January 2025.
In its petition filed Tuesday at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok and Bytedance allege the law is unconstitutional because it stifles Americans’ speech and prevents them from accessing lawful information.
The petition claims the US government “has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning” the short-form video app in an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power.
“For the first time in history,” the petition said, “Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
The original article contains 223 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 9%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Once again, the app isnt going to be banned unless the CCCP refuses to divest from TikTok
Well, then the only hope it has of winning is on first amendment grounds because they already said that they would not be willing to sell the algorithm.
Rough life.
Fuck mega corps including govt owned ones that arent actually owned by the people.
Meta, Amazon, etc should all get fuked as well
They’re only unwilling until they’re out of other options.
They will gladly not have their service in US than selling it to a competitor that could pose a bigger threat to their income.
It doesn’t have to be in the US, just not China, N. Korea, Russia, or Iran. So I think it’s a possibility.
#1. The CCCP is Soviet Russia. #2. The requirement is that Bytedance sells tiktok (along with it’s proprietary algorithms) to a US based company.
CCCP 😂🤣😂. Fuck me that’s hilarious.
Besides what other people have said, there's virtually no chance of the CCP divesting from TikTok.
Yep its going to get banned.
Also I think you mean CCP
It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out. In my head this argument is a little shaky, since it seems to be effectively arguing that Americans have the right to access foreign propoganda machines? There is legal precedent here, but the nature of propoganda has massively changed since the 60s.
This is going to be a very interesting court case that has broad reaching implications, but expect no Americans to give a shit because it’s not going to feature a trash fire to gawk at.
I don’t see why that’s shaky? There a plenty of books written by members of the CPC (Including Xi Jinping himself) on Amazon, in English, should Americans be banned from accessing that foreign propaganda?
Lamont v. Postmaster General(1965)
Supreme Court ruled that publishing propaganda in America is free speech. You’re not allowed to interfere with an American’s access to propaganda
I’m aware of the precedent, but there’s a pretty massive difference between being able to receive printed media, and being able to have continual access to post and contribute content to a foreign propoganda tool that uses an algorithm to purposefully suppress subjects the CCP disapproves of. I don’t believe the precedent is going to be applicable here, but IANAL, and maybe ByteDance’s lawyers think this defense will be a slam dunk.
To me it sounds the exact same. The language doesn’t say “printed propaganda that doesn’t have a lot of nuance” it just says publications.
Sure, but if you tried to explain TikTok to the ruling judge on the 1965 case, I think their head would explode. The ruling isn’t some all powerful precedent that shuts down the ban before the suit can begin, it’s old and outdated. Something like TikTok was not even getting theorized at the time, you can’t seriously expect it to be treated the same way.
I don’t think the source of propaganda is relevant to the distinction being made by the precedent. If TikTok can be considered propaganda, then so can Facebook or Twitter or Instagram because they all utilize algorithms subject to the control or manipulation by their owners.
I believe people should have the right to consume the propaganda they choose.
I can agree with that, but it becomes muddier when it’s a social media platform where your participation on the platform lends it credibility. As an example, the Hong Kong protests were supressed on TikTok at the behest of the CCP. You could argue that by creating the content that ByteDance’s algorithm used to bury the videos being posted on TikTok, regular unwitting Americans were assisting the CCP in covering up the protests.
It’ll be on ByteDance to prove those kinds of concerns invalid, just as it will be the US’ job to demonstrate the threat posed by TikTok to Americans.
The same can be said of any us based social media company.
Idk this just feels like red scare propaganda
Yeah, except China has been committing a genocide and would gladly commit an atrocity on the scale of Israel x Palestine to Taiwan if the U.S. blinks.
Yes, the U.S. is evil as hell, and yet China is still worse. The U.S. doesn’t have citizen reeducation camps, people don’t get disappeared for talking out against dear leader. If you can’t understand why giving an adversary like that unfettered access to people’s minds is a security risk, I’ve no interest in arguing geopolitics with you.
I’m not making a comparison between china and the us, I’m simply pointing out that banning chinese control over social media doesn’t address the vulnerability of social media being manipulated against users by other parties.
If you have a problem with china owning a social media platform because they could potentially scew public perception through manipulative practices, then I would imagine the core of the issue isn’t chinese ownership but the manipulative potential of social media algorithms generally.
I think most people would much prefer more transparent practices and user choice, such as what federated social media protocols provide. We shouldn’t simply ban the one we fear, we should regulate them all so that users have more choice and control themselves.
to not would mean someone is controlling the propaganda I.e. all information
Especially for real law, you would have to define propaganda which I don’t think has really been done.
I have thought about it and I don’t see why all information isn’t some form of propaganda because you’re either bias on purpose by trying to persuade or bias by what you’re aware of and know which can’t be all information with our tiny human minds.
How do you measure bias without having some objective physical level model of the truth even?
I think the argument against TikTok and other Chinese companies is probably that you wouldn’t allow Facebook by Chinese Communist Party and this crosses the line into that. To be fair though, you could probably ultimately make the same argument for US companies. Why is there so much money available for ads for VPNs compared to the financials of that market? Only a few answers to that one…
Propoganda does have a legal definition though, it’s not nearly as nebulous as all biased information. It does need to be purposefully distorting, either by falsifying information or by withholding relevant information. It also needs to be produced by an organized group or government, just making up nonsense about yourself doesn’t count.
Yeah, that’s true-- but all the laws where ‘a reasonable person…’ make me feel like the porn definition “I know it when I see it!”
Only Zionist propaganda is allowed in the US
truthout.org/…/romney-and-blinken-admit-tiktok-ba…
I wouldn’t trust any organization that has “truth” in its name. It’s like the car salesperson who says “Trust me” way too much.
And according to Media Bias/Fact Check, they’ve got a clear bias and are not classified as factual reporting.
Pretty sure they are referencing a publicly available interview
edit: wild to me that people are downvoting a comment providing an additional source, but whatever I guess
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Pretty sure they are referencing a publicly available interview
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The tiktok hate on this platform is bizarre.
I think it just got hyper-politicized and segregated along political lines during the reddit migration.
You can pretty well predict the comment sentiment based on how the topic relates to political discourse. It’s not surprising that a liberal-dominated instance would view TikTok through a political lense, even if it’s super disappointing.
Other privacy-focused instances might see this less politically but lemmy.world has become centered around liberal politics.
It’s literally a video interview of Romney and Blinken talking about why TikTok had to be shut down.
That does seem to be how the article (and Twitter comment) framed it, yes
Yes. I’m not clear on why you went on a tangent about how untrustworthy the site linking the video is.
How the article framed it does not mean that’s what the video was about
This is a really good read about how TikTok regulation fits into the historic skew of legal precedence and past regulation www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/…/677806/
Wouldn’t actual data privacy laws stop this all the same? I can’t help but feel this weird song and dance avoiding the privacy argument exists so US companies don’t get in the crossfire for doing the same shit with your data.
No way in hell they’d ever argue data privacy.
That’s only for apple to pretend to care about while selling your data to brokers.
Sorry Apple is selling user data to data brokers now?
Yeah. They do have their own data collection practices and privacy policies. IIRC, meta was crying over Apple implementing permission data for apps since it would allow people to back off from meta but Apple would be sole winner from that move.
Yeah I was curious about Apple selling data to brokers, which I think would be new news. For Meta yeah that was the ios14 update, which really messed with their bottom line apparently lol
I think I was mistaken on that point. They’re not publicly doing that - just selling ads.
America already controls the TikTok servers. It all needs to be hosted on Oracle, and Oracle can see the source code.
The ban makes no sense seeing the previous requirements.
Oracle can see the source code or the binary?
Yeah I don’t think this person knows what they’re talking about, they must either think ByteDance is hosting the source code on Oracle’s servers or they somehow think that binaries are the same as source code 🤷
I think this person very well knows what they are talking about
TikTok got forced to host all on Oracle servers and store all information there. And have mandatory code inspections.
This was after Trump tried to ban it citing “security concerns”.
The funniest part is that back then Microsoft was supposedly trying to buy TikTok and Trump made sure that wouldn’t happen
The code
What? Surely that’s not true
Where did you get the idea that Oracle can see their source code? That only applies if they host their source repository on Oracle, if they host the servers there chances are it’s binaries that are hosted on the server not the source code.
May 2023 - TikTok Will ‘Soon’ Grant Oracle Full Access to Code, Algorithm
No, because it’s more about the curation algorithm than it is about the data or privacy.
Regulating curation is a clear violation of free speech laws for citizens, but foreign entity that controls TikTok has no such protections. Giving them this protection could be a dangerous precedent.
This is still a problem with US based platforms, though.
I would think people of the fediverse of all places would feel strongly about allowing users to control their own curation rather than allowing private companies to dictate what individual users see.
This is about military bases, bud.
Then why is it not limited to military personnel?
Yes, but congress just authorized a bunch of new surveillance
Affective legislation rather knee jerk reactionary politics? Not in America, buddy.
Remember the golden rule of American thought:
CHINA BAD.
Both can be true, poor US legislation that protects their buddies (investors), and China’s bad
Wasn’t Facebook proven to give misleading information that led old people to vote for Trump that was ultimately from Russia propaganda sources? Where’s the Meta ban?
Ok then, let’s sue for the Chinese ban of literally most of the Internet. Where can I find the court that gives a shit about countries who don’t wanna participate in other countries Internet toys and what the fuck are they gonna do about it?
So… the company that was removed for spreading propaganda is suing for being removed for spreading propaganda and is using…. checks notes: propaganda as evidence.
This should be fun!