The TikTok Battle Is Joined – by Ben Domenech – The Transom
One of the most obvious gaslighting plays by the handful of right-wing defenders of the Chinese Communist Party s popular TikTok app is to depict every potential avenue to banning it as an assault on the First Amendment. This involves pretending, for example, that the only way toward banning the app requires dramatic expansion of government power.
This is, of course, absurd: there s no need to give new power to the Secretary of Commerce, as the Warner-Thune RESTRICT Act does, in order to ban a foreign company engaged in aggressive and deceitful targeting of American citizens data, down to their every keystroke. We already banned Huawei, China Telecom, Hikvision, Dahua, Hytera, and ZTE over spying concerns and Huawei is a far more important company to the Chinese economy (and has suffered massive problems after U.S. sanctions) compared to ByteDance.
The AOC/Rand Paul argument on ByteDance plays games with all of this. They use arguments that only apply to the Warner-Thune bill against more direct measures, such as the Josh Hawley/Ken Buck 5 page bill. And there s an absolutely absurd depiction of the First Amendment concerns at issue. The Supreme Court has already made the distinction between content and conduct as a legal matter. TikTok has negative social effects, that s very clear but no one is trying to ban TikTok as a legal matter because of those negative social effects, they re doing it because China is tracking every American on the app at all times and the capability of blackmail, targeting, manipulation, and more is all far too dangerous to allow. If you have TikTok on your phone, they re tracking every text and email and communication you send. That s not a free speech issue.