* It'd be easy for Apple and Google to prevent downloads of TikTok for most users, which would also include app updates, as they have a significant amount of knowledge of users' locations and could prevent most users in Montana -- even those using a VPN -- from downloading the app or updating it.
* It'd be very difficult for Montana to enforce the other piece of the TikTok ban -- if "entity" in the bill means any company, they're stuck: the state has little ability to prevent side-loading of apps on Android and users who want TikTok can access app repositories hosted out of state. There's virtually no way for ISPs inside Montana to surveil all user usage to find out if they're trying to download TikTok from a third-party repository, and even if they could there would be legal issues with the state mandating this.
Fundamentally, this makes user privacy and security much worse.
* Apple, Google, and ByteDance could be aggressive and use the data they have -- all three have GPS data for most or all relevant users here (i.e. TikTok users on an iPhone or Android) -- and block requests to download or use TikTok from within Montana. And they probably will, unless they get a court to block the bill.
The one thing the bill banning TikTok doesn't do is the one thing that is desperately needed: actually protect user privacy, by banning the collection, aggregation, sale, and use of fine-grained user data -- by ByteDance, Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other.
90%+ users are never going to use apks. If this ban kills the network effect (the R0 of the viral infection), then the last 10% aren't going to last long either.
There will be quite a stir in the school after TikTok disappears, and if a few kids still have access, they will get attention and other kids will want to know how. Perhaps a silver lining is that we're helping the upcoming generation understand the importance of controlling their own devices.
i'd believe it's more likely they'll just switch to instagram. I get that insta may be worse in recommendation, but the extra hassle with apk may be enough to move users towards another app
Eh...given that Instagram Reels is virtually an identical product, I have a feeling kids will migrate over there. On a side note, Meta is probably signing praises for Montana now.
That's true, but TikTok's primary demographic (teenagers) contains a disproportionate part of the population willing to go to remarkable inconveniences to subvert authority. Alcohol and vapes take substantially more effort for your average high schooler to get their hands on than downloading an APK and pressing "install", yet there's no shortage of drinking and vaping happening.
As long as the overall platform is popular, it won't be surprising to see a lot of kids showing each other how to sideload.
> Alcohol and vapes take substantially more effort for your average high schooler to get their hands on
You can order a nicotine vape online in most states and the only required ID is "confirming" that you are over 18. Doesn't detract from your main point.
the thing is, most us people are using iphone and it doesn't have sideloading(there are chances for sideload in eu but not in other places), so instant kill for that demographic(iphone is status symbol and most people have it so they'll not switch to android). For Android - your analogy is not quite good. A better analogy would be prohibiting a mark of alcohol (tiktok) when there is another legalized mark(instagram/shorts) but which tastes a bit worse-> people will continue to drink, but extra hassle will stimulate the switch to the legal type. Both factors will effectively kill the growth effect for tiktok so us userbase will switch (and since eu can have something similar, all western userbase will be cut)
> so instant kill for that demographic(iphone is status symbol and most people have it so they'll not switch to android)
I'd wager that if TikTok got banned in the US and Apple did not immediately follow with allowing sideloading, iPhone would quickly lose its status value in the teenage demographics. After all, status matters most when comparing equivalent goods - it's what justifies spending more for the same thing. In the scenario above, iPhone would immediately become painfully inferior to Android phones, along the dimension that matters a lot for the teenage cohort.
This is only a single state ban, the majority of content creators are unaffected. There is zero chance of this ban having any impact on the network effect. If anything I predict the opposite, people will become frustrated with the walled-garden of iOS, I can see people choosing Android over it for the sake of being able to sideload TikTok. I remember when there was a sudden aftermarket of iOS and Android devices when flappy bird was delisted by the developer. TikTok is obscenely bigger.
This would be true if it was a country that banned TikTok. But the US is very interconnected, people in Montana have friends etc in other states who post regularly on TikTok, so they would be motivated to download APK's (or use a web version). They'll need a VPN too of course, but that's not particularly difficult. They've already heard NordVPN's ads on YouTube.
Doubt it... I seriously doubt even 1% of android users has even heard of FDroid or knows that Amazon has it's own android market you can load on your phone. That will really limit network effect overall.
You may doubt it, but installing VPNs and getting software from alternate sources is a basic life skill in a country like Iran where the government tries hard to control what people see online. The old and young alike are doing this.
I don’t think tiktok is so valuable that Americans will start paying for a 3rd party service just to access it that requires additional setup, hassle, and technical savvy, no.
This comes back to something I mentioned elsewhere:
What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.
The location collection mechanisms built by Apple and Google that would be effective at a state or regional level within the US have been built for advertising, with secondary purposes of opt-in anti-theft. They weren't built for continuous, rigorous enforcement of legal prohibitions within a given sub-region of the USA.
I think you're asserting that e.g. 90% of TikTok users in Montana would be impacted by the ban, and 10% would find a way around. For advertisers, that's fine. For enforcement of a law? Bzzzzzz! That's gonna be arbitrary-and-capricious'ed right out of the courtroom doors.
Part of the issue is that the government itself takes part in that marketplace as a seller and buyer. There's no resonable way to make laws for corporations while giving a pass to government agencies, it might be proposed but it would never pass. One of the biggest clients of Cambridge Analytica was the Trump campaign.
I became disillusioned about hoping laws pass that protect user data after watching the TikTok hearing. The congressman questioning whether TikTok tracks eye dialation as a signal for "the algorithm", and the CEO having to explain that it's used for funny face filters, gave me second hand embarrasment. It reminds me of the Facebook hearing where a congressman ask whether it was possible to ban "finsta" and the Head of Global Safety at FB reponding that it's not a product. It's people having a secondary personal account limited to specific friends. An explanation the congressman was having a hard time understanding.
I think I would use the word misinformed or misguided. I feel it's hard to get a clear understanding because there's a lot of performative politics. There isn't enough push back to obstructionism. There are people doing good work in legislature, but mainstream and social media tend to highlight the bad.
Regarding opinions about things like banning TikTok or protecting section 230, the divide is caused by bad technology literacy. I don't think it's fair to say it's been happening for a while, because the pace of tech development has been so much faster than legislature. The median age of the 118th congress is ~58 years old, broadband internet has only been around for the last ~20.
If they are actually just using eye dilation for funny faces, I would be shocked. It's one of those things that's pretty telling physically. Whichever congressman asked that question was NOT dumb.
He asks "Can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the alogorithm?"
Chew: "The only face data that we collect is when you use the filters to have sunglasses on your face, we need to know where your eyes are."
Congressman: "Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you're not seeing if they're dilated??"
You can click the three dot menu next to the share button to pull up the autogenerated transcript or offical CC on c-span, on youtube. I don't think you can search in the yt app like you can on desktop/mobile. The comments section there speaks volumes about the divide between those congressman and younger generations.
It would require the camera to be on without notifying you, which isn't possible on modern OSes. Also, changes in pupil size are caused by many different things. That question is similar to asking whether heart rate can be used as a signal. They're not tracking eye dialation for funny face filters. That level of tracking requires cameras better than phone selfie ones.
"The responses can have a variety of causes, from an involuntary reflex reaction to exposure or inexposure to light—in low light conditions a dilated pupil lets more light into the eye—or it may indicate interest in the subject of attention or arousal, sexual stimulation,[3] uncertainty,[4] decision conflict,[5] errors,[6] physical activity[7] or increasing cognitive load[8] or demand."
> It'd be very difficult for Montana to enforce the other piece of the TikTok ban
I don't know if it is technically and legally feasible in Montana, but you "just" need to block the endpoints that the app uses to fetch the data. It is not foolproof, but given that ByteDance probably has interest in keeping doing business in the rest of the USA, at least for now, it would be fineable in case it was trying to avoid the block.
I doubt that e.g. mobile carriers have the infrastructure in place to do state-by-state website blocking. Of course we can conceive of the mechanism very simply in the abstract, but that doesn't necessarily mean that implementing it will be simple for them.
> * It'd be easy for Apple and Google to prevent downloads of TikTok for most users, which would also include app updates, as they have a significant amount of knowledge of users' locations and could prevent most users in Montana -- even those using a VPN -- from downloading the app or updating it.
I find this statement odd. It's one thing to have the data and another thing to assert that it's either readily available or easy to insert into legacy systems. Do you know this to be true? Or is this just a guess on your end? Because it sounds like a guess. And with guessing becomes weakened trust in what people "report" or "analyze".
This is not a user privacy vs. megacorp story, it's a national security story.
I wish there was a megacorp privacy story to run here, sadly, I'm not sure Congress will go for it.
There is only one solution and that is for TT to be 'forked' from ByteDance/Doyin. It would literally cost almost nothing, there are almost zero synergies between Doyin and TT at this point, they will do just fine separately, and it won't cost anything but a few bankers/accountants to do the split.
TT will have to be based in Singapore or US and be completely independent from BD/Doyin but that's fine.
Nothing will skip a beat, everyone can be happy, kids can have their app but CCP won't have any control visibility at all.
Funny enough, ByteDance could probably retain maybe even majority control, although that might not work in practices.
And then we can get on with trying to get Congress to protect consumers from Meta ...
Users will still need to connect to TikTok’s servers right? Can’t they implement an IP block or something on those servers - this way even if you have the app it’s useless unless you use a VPN.
> The one thing the bill banning TikTok doesn't do is the one thing that is desperately needed: actually protect user privacy, by banning the collection, aggregation, sale, and use of fine-grained user data -- by ByteDance, Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other.
I totally agree it doesn't do that and I want that, but at this point that is a major battle esp with how big tech have embedded themselves into govt.
This is a smaller battle won, and I hope it spreads. There's nothing bad about a multi-pronged approach.
I live in a country where such a ban on certain "enemy" social networks was implemented a few years ago.
What will happen is this.
Teens will download a shit ton of VPN applications, the vast majority of which are specifically produced and marketed by the enemy to circumvent said ban. Then all users' phone traffic gets routed via the enemy VPN instead of just the social app's requests.
Win-win for both sides:
- the government gets populistic approval from the eldery population;
- the adversary gets way more US users' data than they ever dreamed of.
The ones with the companies that buy all the data and give it to the government without the users ok.
The others, which don't do that with a company but rather a government institution.
Snowden: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
that's a very non-answer answer to the question of why would China pay $10+ or whatever for my address and my location in the US. To sway my vote? How does this make any sense?
I always assume that I'm not the smartest person in the room/world. There are 'unknown unknowns' everywhere, and people far smarter than me dedicate their lives to creating more of these unknowns for their own purposes, the purposes of their employers, their governments, etc.
I know this type of data can be misused in a variety of ways. Despite the fact that I can't exactly articulate how it might be misused in this instance, I choose 'default deny' because it reduces attack surface and the amount of unknowns that I have to contend with.
It seems you operate on a 'default allow' rule when it comes to this stuff, and you're welcome to choose that for yourself, but this is a minority position in today's distrustful world. It is very optimistic!
> will sell data on anyone in their database, including current address, phone number and arrest records
I see. My current address, my phone number and something called my (public) arrest records are being sold to evil China at $10/pop. My phone number must be selling like hotcakes!
One thing Xi and Putin want to do, is to manipulate you to vote for their favorite future president (or future dictator) in the US. (Don't know if you're in the US though)
That would be a pretty considerable malinvestment considering the divisions of power and how lobbyist/special interests/ultrawealthy influences shape the American political discourse and outcomes. The whole process is a sham. It's all a very public sham, and has been, and I'm sure it's very salient to our geopolitical "opponents", and particularly those seated in the highest echelons.
However, what would make sense is sewing discord amongst the plebs and fraying the few little ties that bind which would drastically shift the US stranglehold because it would invariably lead to schismogenesis and a legitimately fractured nation with dramatic reallocation of power and character. This may be affected to some extent by bitter rivalries in the body politic, but that would be secondary to breaking the nation.
But really it just reads like the Red Scare banter all over again.
Do you not believe that the governments of Russia and China will pursue their interests at the expense of the United States? Of course they would, and it seems bananas to me that we should pretend otherwise.
no, no way. I will never let those miscreants manipulate my vote with videos of funny cats, it's not like I'm brainless! My vote is safe in the firm hands of Fox and CNN.
My wife is an 8th grade social studies teacher at a public school in Texas. I spent yesterday in her classroom as the resident technology expert and answered questions about semiconductor manufacturing, neural networks and cryptocurrencies in discussions about trade-offs with technology.
For one, the kids don’t really use TikTok that much and use a handful of apps. Different cliques used different apps more than others. They understood the geopolitical issues with TikTok and very few cared enough about TikTok in particular. They would all just use Reels or some other app more often.
This may be the case for the subset polled but TikTok is wildly popular with teens and for good reason, it’s the most “organic” feeling social media app with an addictive algorithm. Also TikTok allowed the expression of a lot of speech and ideas that had previously been more suppressed on other social media outlets because of political reasons, for example. YouTube and instagram are far more moderated in favor of American bias compared to TikTok, and it shows by how careful YouTube creators are with what they say. Instagram was found to suppress political speech of, for example, Palestinian rights activists during the removal of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah by Israeli forces.
Or vendors that currently sell cases and repair screens will then offer a service to sideload such apps for teens and install who knows what other stuff on phones for a fee from a customer and malware vendors.
The Prohibition did now work back then and only made the Mafia rich and made them push drugs when it was lifted.
Except prohibition did exactly what it was designed to do. At the start of prohibition, alcohol consumption dropped to 30% of what it was before, and even after people figured out the loopholes and tried working around it, alcohol consumption peaked at like 65% of previous consumption, which was massive.
If the actual goal was to improve safety, health, and quality of life in perpetuity, I’m skeptical that it did what it was designed to do. A law that simply imprisoned everyone might also improve some metrics, but at great cost. The argument is presumably that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Our teens aren't this determined t use a banned platform, don't bet on them suddenly buying VPN services just to use TikTok. It's like saying "oh look Elon bought Twitter and suddenly the select few of our special users will flee to Mastadon as a result and Twitter is dead." Just a bad bet. Convenience is king.
IMO this sounds a bit more like an argument for banning the "vast majority" of VPN apps on the Google/App stores apparently re-routing all traffic to enemies (though I'm skeptical) and less of an argument as to whether or not TikTok should be banned.
It's always been weird that the US border is legally 100miles thick around the USA, for customs and immigration, but the Internet cables don't have borders.
What about this false equivalency between China and the US? Even in a worse case scenario, data being taken by US intelligence is given SOME form of oversight. If you believe the US and China are similarly free, I invite you to tell me if you feel like you’re as free in New York City and San Francisco as Shanghai or Shenzen.
If you don’t think living in those two locations is equivalent, then why do you argue the data collection is the same.
Internationally, the US has burned, bombed, tortured, and assassinated the idea of equivalency out of existence.
If the problem is the behaviour of social media companies in general, legislate against that. Take note that it's not the conversation that's being had and that the people steering it have made their agenda, and ignorance, rather clear.
TikTok being evil is not the main point of OP. Is the society best served with banning evil things, would be a better framing. Banning is a knee-jerk reaction, and an attractive revenge fantasy for many, but when we're talking about society (or raising children), banning without other actions doesn't make the thing go away. For examples, look at the attempt of banning alcohol, drugs or sex work.
I don’t see the equivalency, since an American or European company can copy TikTok.
You can get your digital cocaine as long as it’s safely sourced.
They’re not banning TikTok style companies (which would be similar to your analogy) they are banning TikTok specifically due to its origin and actions (intelligence collection).
Massive data collection being funnelled directly to the benefit of an adversarial totalitarian state.
Often coordinating to target intelligence and political targets.
It’s a technological wing for a totalitarian intelligence department. That’s what it is. It also has social media functions, but it also has an intelligence function.
If you think “well the US does it too” well I invite you to move to Shanghai and live the rest of your days there and tell me you feel just as free as in New York City.
> move to Shanghai and live the rest of your days there and tell me you feel just as free as in New York City.
In what ways would your freedom be impacted in Shangai vs NYC?
Because I know or a fact I'd able to live a normal life in Shangai. Work, grow kids, go out and enjoy entertainment, have good healthcare and so on.
Is it the ability to vote your president that makes or break "freedom" for you? Well apparently ~40% of USAmericans have given that up as the average voter turnout in the US is ~60%. The vote you are offered in the US is a Hobson's choice, it's a choice between bad and worse.
What a doomer outlook. Living in one of the best places run by a brutal, genocidal autocracy isn't so bad you guys (assuming you're in the ingroup, stay in line, ignore meatfisted policy implications, etc.)!
Doomer? Hundreds of millions getting out of poverty in China is all the hope I need.
Being afforded the opportunity to choose between a bad and a worse government gives me no hope, and apparently many feel the same in the so-called liberal democracies.
Just check this graph[0] at page 27. Am I the doomer or are about 40% of the world voters feeling doomed?
> brutal, genocidal autocracy
Brutal how? Genocidal is false as the whole Uyghur genocide has been proven over and over to be bullshit.
> assuming you're in the ingroup, stay in line, ignore meatfisted policy implications
lol, try to be openly communist in the USA and see what happens to your career.
What would be the specific harm of TikTok? Is it because of China, or because of this style of social media apps?
If it's because of China, then ban TikTok and subsidize a competitor app - but be serious about it. Be ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on keeping the app free and servers up for years, sponsoring hundreds of content creators, dragging celebrities in to produce exclusive content, burning tons of money on all kinds of loss-generating marketing bullshit, like "publish a video from $concert, best 100 videos win a Nintendo Switch", for each concert in the state/country for the next few years.
Point being, if you can provide a TikTok alternative and make it extremely attractive, even if by literally giving away hundreds of dollars to each new user, then kids won't care about using TikTok anymore.
Now, if it's not about China but teenage use of social media?
Put an absurdly high tax on smartphones. Like 200%-1000%. That will make sure they become unavailable to a typical teenager.
Beyond that? I don't think you can do much about it directly, or in the immediate term.
> If it's because of China, then ban TikTok and subsidize a competitor app - but be serious about it. Be ready to spend hundreds of .....
Domestic competitors have already published their equivalents though, no subsidied required. It's not a very complicated app - they had clones up in months. Most popular Tik-Tokers already repost their content on these anyways.
Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.
> Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.
Because the problem presented here is: government bans TikTok, teenagers become experts at using VPN apps to work around the ban.
Social media apps live on network effects - it's near-impossible to compete with a well-established giant directly. But this also means that, if you manage to pull a critical mass of users over from your direct competitor, most of the rest will quickly switch too.
Therefore, the solution to teenagers overcoming the ban with VPN is to prop up a domestic competitor fast - pump money into it until it becomes more attractive to the kids than jumping through VPN hoops to get to TikTok. Once you get there, the problem solves itself.
(This is ofc. only for the scenario where the problem is China, not TikTok-style social media.)
Your argument rests heavily on "teens WILL overwhelmingly become VPN experts"
I don't understand why it can't instead be: banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it.
Sure some teens will use a VPN and continue to use TikTok, but I'm not sure it'll be to such an extent that we'd be forced to concede that banning was the wrong call.
> Your argument rests heavily on "teens WILL overwhelmingly become VPN experts"
My argument rests on "social media is sticky due to network effects".
Which is why "banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it" if and only if the domestic alternatives are so good in comparison to figuring out VPN, that a critical mass of domestic users switch over. Ban alone won't make it happen - TikTok is too sticky for that.
Those are teenagers we're talking about. They're resourceful, motivated, have infinite free time - learning how to use a VPN app will be trivial for them, especially that "VPN" here doesn't mean Wireguard or ISO/OSI hokus pocus, but rather a turnkey app that requires about three clicks to make your US Internet connection look like it's coming out of Somalia. It's not hard for them - and will be even easier if a ban on TikTok makes VPN companies target the teenager market directly.
OK, you've changed my mind and I've updated more towards "banning alone is likely to be net negative to our goals if we don't also subsidize alternatives"
I think given I don't use TikTok at all I am bad at intuiting how powerful its network stickiness is.
That's really ignoring the network effect that you're claiming to be dealing with.
As said, you don't subsidize the app creation or use. The apps already exist. The users know roughly how to use them.
The solution would be to take the X biggest content creators and pay them Y Million dollars each to stop posting on tiktok, and start posting on the competitors. Everyone else will follow.
It's not "government sponsored" as in Official Propaganda Arm of the United States, but rather "government sponsored" as in every other thing in your life, such as water, electricity, telecommunications, roads, policing, healthcare, ...
In that hypothetical I identify the federal policy I think would be effective and vote for the US rep, Senate and presidential candidates I think are most likely to enact that policy. As a state legislature I probably have some sway with my constituents, so I also publicly endorse that policy and candidates.
What I’m getting at is this isn’t an issue for the state level.
That assumes zero barriers to entry. Social media apps are pure network effect, making them the opposite of free market. You can't compete directly with TikTok without quickly matching its userbase and content volume.
Well, in a free market there’s no ban. Is the reason for the ban “dur dur China?”, or performative political theater?
Montanas politics are such that they you can’t find an OB to deliver a baby anymore, so any “free market” competitor needs to consider what random event will put them out of business.
Sometimes people say "you only hate TikTok because it's a foreign company doing it better than American social media". Maybe that's right, maybe TikTok is just doing it better than American social media platforms, but what have we been saying about American social media for the last decade? (generally not positive things)
Maybe at some point this was all going to hit some kind of threshold where it is just no longer reasonable to call the effects of social media a net good. Maybe TikTok has passed that threshold. We can give them a trophy for that, but then plan some ways to finally restrict social media's addictive and anxiety-provoking qualities.
So restrictions on infinite scroll, or require the user to actually press a button before the next video starts. I'm sure there are a lot of ideas, and people more qualified than me to suggest them, but I think these two alone would be reasonable restrictions.
It disturbs me that TikTok being a Chinese company is being used right now as an excuse as to why these social media platforms shouldn't be made to change their deliberately addictive designs.
Let's say establishing policies to reduce the use of Fox News in the population is the right move. What policies would you suggest?
Let's say establishing policies to reduce the use of firearms in the population is the right move. What policies would you suggest?
(now, people are going to pop up with the obvious objections to those. What is it about US users of TikTok that suddenly makes the 1st Amendment and all those free speech concerns that people bring up not apply?)
What does the government have to do with what apps I use in my free time? Are they also going to force me to read nonfiction instead of fiction because it's "the right move"? This sounds like some dystopian crap. What committee decides which apps are good for you or not and how long is long enough?
> What does the government have to do with what apps I use in my free time?
Because it's literally their job: Protect the citizen. They may not do a good job all the time, most times they are even very bad. But nonetheless do they try and prevent most of the worst cases. And TikTok is so insane efficient in what it's doing, the line between benefit and harm is so thin, it could easily turn into a "worst case"-scenario if people don't observe it careful enough.
> Because it's literally their job: Protect the citizen.
That is not automatically the government's job. At least not in every worldview.
And these things exist on a spectrum. Protecting people from direct external threats is pretty unobjectionable to most philosophical systems that allow governments, but there's a lot more controversy around protecting people from themselves.
What about propaganda outlets like Newsmax and OANN? Many would argue they've had far more harmful impact on the USA than Tiktok ever could. Where do you draw the line? It has to be domestic propaganda? Can you prove that those don't have foreign links?
You draw the line SOMEWHERE, just like you always do, for every right already. We already have lines all over rights, and it's not crazy to add another line somewhere and let the judiciary move it around and change it's shape. That's their job.
The PLA has published brilliant books on how to beat America in a non-kinetic war but Americans in general don't like to read.
As someone who thinks Unrestricted Warfare is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read, the idea most have not read this book in the US military is quite laughable.
Imagine people having no issue with the Soviet Union delivering a free daily newspaper to US teenagers in 1960. The level Americans have their head up their own ass is unbelievable.
Politics is downstream of culture. if we wanted to reduce social media use, we could try to change internet habits and attitudes writ large. Something like a “put down the phone and talk to people” campaign, a la anti-smoking/drinking/drunk driving efforts of yore. That way it doesn’t feel like teens in particular are being targeted by out of touch adults. At least, not as much.
It's not, but the analogy breaks down here anyway.
I.e. technically everything influences everything else, but some things influence others much stronger than the reverse.
My usual water-based analogy is that culture and society is like a water flowing downhill; economic situation (all the incentives people have) forms the landscape. Technology is what sculpts the landscape.
The flow of water does have its own influence - over time, it smoothens out rough edges, and can even forge its own path when the landscape is opposing water too hard. But mostly, the water conforms to the shape of the terrain. Same is with culture - it softens the behaviors of people following incentives, and can reform some aspects of the economy that just don't feel right - but mostly, the economy pretty much determines what culture develops, what people do, what people think. New technologies alter economic landscape quickly, but we don't have much control over when they show up or how the landscape is altered.
You know, all this nonsense could be avoided if we went back to the "if you want to ban our service build yourself a great firewall or get fucked, we don't have to enforce your laws for you" status quo. Unfortunately precedent has been set for foreign persons and corporations to be liable for violating laws of countries they're not centered in just because theyre available to communicate with freely across borders. The big ones like google went along with it for money, now I live in a world where I could potentially be extradited to a foreign country I've never set foot in for saying things on the internet to one of their citizens. So the way I see it I'm happy to watch this whole system of control go ablaze from stupid laws like this one. If authoritarians want to block certain content from their citizens they can do the censoring themselves, but if they want people to have to censor themselves or face penalties they're going to have to deal with stupid shit like this. You can't have it both ways.
So, I avoided VPNs for years because they had no practical benefit. I live in Utah, and I would consider myself very technically adept. Previously, I didn't like "VPNs" because now I'm just routing all my traffic through another untrusted 3rd party. It's like choosing between two evils, would I prefer my ISP knows where I go, or some rando that I also have to pay? Worse, the "rando" (usually) requires a VPN app which could get up to all sorts of fuckery. So. yada yada yada.
Well, then, two things happened back-to-back. The VPN provider Mullvad was unsuccessfully raided, and Utah passed hyper-totalitarian laws. On the recent PR news, I investigated Mullval, and... they're fantastic. You don't have to use their app; they support straight openvpn or wireguard and are Linux native. AND I can pay them in BTC, further obscuring myself.
Because of Utah's law, the vast majority of my traffic is now directed over a VPN. I don't even really go to porn sites all that often. It's more the principle of it.
The more the state pushes to limit and remove freedoms, the more I will do everything in my power to push the other way. It's the Hacker Mindset =D
> AND I can pay them in BTC, further obscuring myself.
Which is not really impressive since BTC can be tracked. What is impressive, however, is you can just mail them cash with a piece of paper with your account number on it and they will add that money as credit on your account.
I generally have the same thought process (rather go through ISP than VPN) but one angle of this thought that I've struggled with is: what makes my ISP any less of a rando than the VPN that I choose? At least I have more choices with my VPN than with my ISP...
...but I still haven't bitten the bullet on a VPN yet.
The problem is your ISP is bound to your physical location and is forced to obey the laws in that jurisdiction in order to continue operating there. The VPN provider, especially one in another country, has no such concerns. In mmh0000's case, they're in Utah and don't wish to follow Utah's laws. Thus it's that the VPN being able to be a rando, and the ISP being very much not is central to using a VPN over having to trust the ISP, which very much knows exactly where you live.
I haven't actually seen anything about a Utah law yet, only the Montana ban of TikTok. What exactly does "hyper-totalitarian" mean compared to totalitarian, and what was the Utah law passed recently?
Oh right, I remember seeing something about that now.
Guess I was expecting something a bit worse, I don't see how online age requirements will help but it doesn't land as "hyper-totalitarian" to me either. Feels like a less enforcement version of age limits on buying alcohol or cigarettes - a hit on personal freedoms but can't say I've ever heard those labeled as totalitarian.
I saw a BBC story the other week bemoaning how state college students were circumventing firewalls of foreign media using VPNs.. the irony seemed to be lost on them.
Not really. VPNs don't help your privacy outside specific niche use cases.
The only reason to use a VPN is when you want to hide your IP address from the other end of your communication. You get effectively the same service from public WiFi at a cafe.
Most non-technical people I hear talking about VPNs get them completely confused with encryption. VPNs do not hide the content of your communication: that is already happening with SSL.
>The law specifies that no penalties apply to users of TikTok. But app store operators and TikTok itself could face fines of $10,000 per violation per day, with an individual violation defined as “each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok.”
No. Although I'm a Texan, it'll probably happen anyway if it hasn't already and my vote doesn't matter. I don't want the government deciding what software I'm allowed to use and what forms of speech and entertainment I'm allowed to expose myself to.
And I notice none of these conservatives are talking about banning Twitter anymore - which is far more psychologically manipulative than TikTok - now that one of their own has taken it over to push as much right-wing propaganda on it as possible, just to hassle the "woke hivemind."
I'm fine with app stores making the decision on their own but I prefer to not throw the entire framework of free speech out the window just because stoking fear of the "red menace" still works in the US.
I hate TikTok and CCP, but banning an app from use is just wrong.
Want to fight TikTok addiction or privacy issues with CCP? Sure, do it. But find other ways: banning users from using it, whereas especially everybody else can access it, is a huge punch on the rights of your own people.
National security is not a uniquely "wasp" concern, which you would know if you were ever in the military. What an incredibly ignorant and racist thing to suggest.
That's why the issue needs to be solved by legislation that regulates data collection. Targeting a specific app just because of WHO the data is going to is at best a military operation, or at worst xenophobic. Doesn't matter to me who is trying to collect my data, I want a say.
The only solution would be to inform users that their data is funnelled to CCP servers in very obscure ways, that’s the only right thing that you could do.
Enable people to make informed decisions. Want your data stolen? Then go ahead.
Can somebody explain to me how TikTok in iPhone is worse than Facebook?
The say "TikTok collects a large amount of personal information, which has raised concerns about data mining and potential misuse of user data." - what information they collect and Facebook does not collect?
Installed the app last night. It would be interesting to see their DAU graph for the state!
Something worthwhile noting here is that the usual "politicians don't understand the technology" sentiment doesn't apply here because our governor at least knows how to code Perl, and ran a software company.
Gonna back this up, from the security research I’ve read the app *uploads* over 2gb of data once installed over the course of one month, without any interaction at all from the user.
What is the data? Doesn't iOS limit access to anything outside of the app?
It has to ask to access contacts, photos, location. If you just use it to scroll through stupid videos, what does it even have access to?
IIRC the traffic is encrypted, all TCP/IP packets but going to bytedance servers. Without interacting with the app I have no idea what it could be sending but scary to speculate.
Everyone here should know it's very easy to bypass any TLS on a device you control and sniff the traffic. if there was some malicious data being sent there's plenty of people to ring the alarm bells: the people reverse engineering the internal API to make bots, the black hats trying to steal user data, the scrapers stealing content,...
please speculate. I just don't understand what it would even have access to. Are you worried about it exploiting iOS bugs? Otherwise it should only have explicit access to what I grant, right? No audio, video, files, photos, contacts, location.
Right, in theory iOS should sandbox it. But all the other functionality that’s exposed is probably getting sent over (think ip address, connection settings, iOS OS fingerprint).
My guess is most of that data is just a keep-alive c2 style connection with ByteDance. Heaven forbid the CCP develops some iOS zero days and then has a list of every single iOS device that would be vulnerable to it.
This stuff has been talked about often enough that it should be well-documented, but can we have a detailed rundown on the stuff that TikTok does that isn't done by other apps?
I think the issue is:
1. The sheer amount of people it affects
2. The fact that the power resides with the CCP.
Not like I trust any countries’ government but the CCP clearly has goals counter to the West’s
One underappreciated aspect of this is ban is that anyone who wants Tiktok will just go download it in Wyoming or Idaho etc, as it seems to be merely a ban on downloading the app, and not a ban on Tiktok traffic itself. So the ban will have near zero actual impact in practice (even if it somehow makes it into effect).
Furthermore, it's unclear if the web app of Tiktok will be affected, or if it's only a ban on the mobile app.
Disagree with zero impact, it is a question of accessibility. Downloading an app is easy, going to another state to download an app is significantly harder. You are right that this does not stop determined people from downloading TikTok, but it definitely will slow down user growth in Montana... and open the door to further regulation in the future.
Also am Montanan and Wyoming or Idaho are far away for some of us. I don't know many people who would drive multiple hours to get an app. But sure, anyone who wants it badly enough will be able to get it. It doesnt seem like the point is a total all out ban though. It's a deterrent for the general public who will default to not downloading now rather than defaulting to downloading.
The point of censorship is not really to ban something outright. It's to show that a thing can be banned, that this thing is not safe from just doing whatever it wants. It is mostly to assert a dominance over a socio-cultural domain and to establish an identity by negation. The initiators of the ban probably do not believe the banning will work either. The main point of the ban is the enforcement of the ban, not the ban itself. It is also done out of fear, to undermine a disrupting element of the established order, which Tik Tok certainly is. I mean, it's pretty much brain poison lol
As I understand it, no. Montana would have to be effectively regulating interstate trade since neither Apple nor Google have offices here. Plus, the whole "negotiate commerce and treaties with foreign entities" thing.
The Supreme Court just upheld California rules about the sale of pork. Looking at it strictly from the interstate commerce view, this doesn’t appear much different.
So can apple turn off all iphones in Montana in retaliation. Bet it would be easier/cheaper to cut off those customers than implement any changes. Android phone makes could follow suit
It'd be hard to identify a phone associated with a "Montana citizen". Not impossible, but I think that based on Apple and Google's comments on these laws that they haven't built the functionality in.
GeoIP doesn't work because carriers (especially in Montana) tend to assign IPs from surrounding states as much as they do local cities. When I'm on the cell network, I'm regularly identified as coming out of Denver. Phone number area codes are equally useless, since half the folks I know here in Montana have area codes from outside states. GPS would be the best bet, though I feel like even that would have some major caveats (the use would have to be decoupled from the location services controls/displays, something they don't do for even their own apps right now).
Also, people rely on cellphones for emergency services. A manufacturer shutting down phones would probably expose them to some serious liabilities.
It's predictable that it's coming from a conservative state. That they are broadly against using state power to ban things is part of their identity and marketing but not reality. Especially when it can be construed as a social-moral problem.
Or, in other words, all "conservatives" don't necessarily agree on or believe the same things, and this varies by person and by region.
Like any political group, there's a wide variety of ideas. Religious right folks get lumped together with constitutional libertarians, but have very, very different ideas on the proper limits of legislation and government power.
And yes, there are both idiots and brilliant thinkers in the Republican party (which !== 'conservative'). There are very good ideas, and abominably stupid ones.
I think there is still value in pointing out that the Republican party line of individual liberties and small government is nothing but marketing jingle. When it comes down to brass tacks they are as quick to use the government to crack down on an individuals choices as the other guys.
I'm not speaking about the validity of their ideas or the cohesion of their group identity. Just pointing out that their reputation as being universally against top-down bans is not based on their actions when given the capacity to enact top-down bans.
They probably also see States Rights (the philosophy, not necessarily a legal interpretation) as opposite Federal power.
States rights isn't just for social-moral topics such as marijuana and immigration.
We should have expected it to be used for other things as has historically been the case.
I didn't claim no other groups use state power to ban things. I'm pointing out that the idea that conservatives are uniquely and generally opposed to it is fantasy.
The State of California automatically issued digital vaccine certificates. Basically QR codes that could be read by a business with the appropriate hardware.
The state offered them, but they weren't the only way to get one. Any SMART compliant digital card (which most major healthcare providers and chain pharmacies provide) will pass verification anywhere a CA state one would.
Unless they changed up the bill since I looked at it, you’ve got a bill of attainder with serious Constitutional issues, including First Amendment, due process, and dormant Commerce Clause problems. It’s very hard for me to see a federal court letting this stand, even at a time where every day brings another “federal court lets bad law stand” story.
Maybe, maybe not. The courts will decide. To those saying it's obviously unconstitutional, remember that the constitution is whatever five people on the Supreme Court says it is.
> (a) the operation of tiktok by the company or users; or
I don't see how owners of iOS or Android phones can be in any way said to be users of Apple or Google. At best this would apply to TikTok itself, or to companies which supply phones to employees.
If ‘the company’ (unclear who that refers to. Bad statute-writing. Assume it means the same thing as entity but a court could interpret it however it chooses) or a ‘user’ (whoever that is) ‘operates’ the TikTok app in the territorial jurisdiction of Montana (insert your own interpretation of ‘operate’ and ‘in’) then a violation occurs for which ‘an entity’ is liable.
So if someone inside Montana launches the TikTok app on an iPhone either an App Store (presumably Apple’s) or TikTok itself is liable for that violation.
The article claims "...will not impose any penalties on individuals using the app". A commenter elsewhere in this thread links to the law itself, which could presumably disambiguate, though I've not read it.
> anyone who wants Tiktok will just go download it in Wyoming or Idaho etc
Someone needs to setup a nonprofit that will transport a user's phone to a free state and setup TikTok for a modest fee. The nonprofit could use the money to reimburse the women and transgender people who now need to travel to free states for some of their health care.
The ban itself seems more geared at restricting Bytedance’s ability to operate (and fine them) and less about preventing the people of Montana from using it, especially since there’s no ISP or traffic restriction on it.
Information funnels don't work by such hyper rational actions such as 'going to a different state to do something'.
That won't happen.
TT use will fall dramatically, and given the nature of 'tipping points and critical masses' - it will change things.
The 'strategic' issue, is that this may be the US doing a bit of 'dipping toes in the water' in a small state, before taking broader action, which I think they will do.
Seems facially unconstitutional. Will maybe force a proper court decision on whether the Bills of Attainder clause applies to corporations.
Why are legislators so focused on banning TikTok, rather than regulating whatever it is that TikTok does that they don't like?
Don't like data about your constituents being in the possession of a company with ownership ties to the Chinese government or communist party? Do the work to describe what kind of 'ties' are the ones that worry you, what kind of entities are the ones you don't like, what kind of data you don't like being in their hands, and write a law that codifies that.
> Why are legislators so focused on banning TikTok, rather than regulating whatever it is that TikTok does that they don't like?
Because a foreign company succeeded in the US. If Tiktok had simply done what the US wanted, and done a fire sale to a US company, Tiktok would be welcomed with open arms and there isn't a privacy violation the company could commit that would get it into real legal trouble. Tiktok would be deeply embedded in society and not having it would be like not having a telephone number.
The Tiktok situation is what US companies face around the world when they enter a foreign market and dominate (see: Facebook/Google and GDPR, or Apple being forced to allow other app stores on the iPhone by the EU). Those countries suddenly discover they have principles and vigorously enforce them. This is just the first time that the US has been walloped so badly in this game that it's been forced to discover principles, too.
Regulating what Tiktok does that they don't like is too hard, we might end up harming US companies that do the exact same things. So the lazy workaround is to make noise about the principles but then just target the company directly.
Agreed! But it's always so much easier to ban and get credit for "protecting Americans" than do the work and build a solid base for the future. We should hold our politicians to a higher standard.
>Countries have the right to ban foreign adversaries
This is the same logic that China uses to ban all western apps. Fortunately in the west, countries don't have rights, people do, and citizens generally have the right to run whatever software they want on the hardware devices they own. Governments that violate such rights get challenged in court.
Apart from the asinine war drugs, risky foods, weapons, counterfeit goods, and dangerous devices, ordinary prohibited goods aren't arbitrarily decided by fiat of Big Mother.
Kinder Surprise were banned due to the letter of the 1938 FFDCA law as "non-nutritive object".
There's usually a regulatory reason, such as homologation on automobiles. There are some protectionist laws around types of automobiles that can be imported.
It's a very convenient arrangement - first you get a couple of tech megacorps to monopolize the device and app store market to the point where the vast majority of apps are only ever published on their platforms and through their distribution channels. And then you regulate those megacorps and claim that this has nothing to do with restricting what the citizens have access to, even though the net result is the same.
I don't mind regulation when it serves a useful purpose, but 1) this one does not, and 2) pretending that it doesn't affect individuals because it only directly targets companies is misleading. If you genuinely believe that TikTok should not be available to anyone, then argue that openly.
Well, it does if you think that TikTok is a national security threat.
> If you genuinely believe that TikTok should not be available to anyone
This statement of yours just means that you can't argue against the actual point, and instead have to make up a new one to attack, instead of the actual stated position.
The actual stated position is that we put regulations on businesses all the time.
And it is better to do that, than enforcement on individuals.
The reasons why it is better to do completely standard, and normal business regulations, is because if enforcement was on individuals instead, it would have to involve draconian things like checking everyone's phones all the time.
Nah. There is no need to do that. App store regulations are perfectly fine instead, and there is no need to defend some absurd position, that nobody is arguing, like that everyone's phones should be investigated by the government.
And this is no different than when California puts laws on pork businesses.
>This is the same logic that China uses to ban all western apps
Except it doesn't. It's just that apps are required to follow local laws, and many companies - like Google - don't want to, because their entire business is exploiting users' privacy.
What makes a company a "US Company"? Aren't the big social media companies all global with offices in the US and most other countries? I get that a lot were founded here, but I don't get the impression that they feel that they derive any particular allegiance to the US because of that. Isn't it to the shareholders?
Actually - correcting myself. There IS a clause that unbans TikTok on ownership transfer. I didn't read far enough down:
> Section 4. Contingent voidness. [This act] is void if tiktok is acquired by or sold to a company that is not incorporated in any other country designated as a foreign adversary in 15 C.F.R. 7.4 at the time tiktok is sold or acquired.
If TikTok is transferred to a company not owned by China the act goes away.
So they could just do that, then reacquire the company and this law vanishes in a puff of logic.
The law would still be on the books. Presumably it would become non-void, and immediately active, if a Chinese company repurchased TikTok from a non-Chinese company. Much like unconstitutional laws prohibiting abortion became immediately active again after the recent Supreme Court ruling.
As I understand it, nope. States can't negotiate treaties on the US' behalf. Commerce and sanctions would fall under that as I understand it.
States also can't regulate interstate trade, which I believe trying to penalize Apple and Google would constitute, since neither has a office in Montana.
California doesn't require auto manufacturers to do anything. They require dealers and individuals to only buy cars that meet said emissions standards, on penalty of refusing to allow them to be registered to be driven on the state's roads.
> Why are legislators so focused on banning TikTok, rather than regulating whatever it is that TikTok does that they don't like
There are two issues with TikTok: privacy and national security. The latter is what this is about. (Related to e.g. our foreign media ownership rules.)
The federal legislation is trying to create an extensible system for forcing divestiture based on requirements you describe. This is more ham fisted.
There's also the third issue, which is much more problematic to fix with regulation: short-form video is absolutely killing youth attention span. I know students who will ask another student a question, and then lose focus and zone out within literally 3 seconds and not hear the answer. This was not nearly as prevalent a decade ago.
And the 4th option - it’s eating American companies lunch and apparently the free market party thinks it’s now okay to take away things from its citizens based on scaremongering and innuendo.
> the third issue, which is much more problematic to fix with regulation: short-form video is absolutely killing youth attention span
We age gate tobacco, alcohol and even pornography. Is it impermeable? Of course not. Does it prevent Adam Mosseri from contemplating PornHub for Kids [1]? Yes.
"and demands mobile app stores make the app unavailable for Montana residents."
Oh so now they've made an enemy of Google & Apples legal teams? Because those two aren't going to want to set a precedent for all sorts of bans across random jurisdictions.
These are states… should there be city level bans too? Where does it end. Now they need 50 different app stores just for the US customers? Does DC get its own? How should we handle US territories… I think Apple and a Google have plenty reason to fight this.
States are sovereign except for specific roles and powers explicitly reserved for the federal government or otherwise restricted from the states. These aren't provinces, theyre more like European countries in the EU.
At a technological level there is no difference. If there's a reliable mechanism for geo-walling content they can carve up the map however they wish. Nothing says it can only follow national borders.
They already did when they geoblocked content in European and Asian countries to appease their authoritarian leaders in order to profit from their large markets.
"Is there a good reason to ban TikTok?... the answer is still “nobody knows.”
I believe the second sentence answers the first, but not in the way the author intended.
I'm not fundamentally insisting that we legally declare all data compromised until proven otherwise, but there is reasonable risk here that we cannot assuage.
As for whether SB 419 can be upheld: Eh. ~50 states, one of which is being used as a test here. Fine, that's one of the great benefits of the state+fed system. This is probing and forcing people to have the conversation, and that alone feels like this is worth it. Of course I 'sacrifice' Montana residents with this statement, which I arguably have no right to do.
Every Republican controlled state passed some sort of TikTok ban this year. TikTok has joined "transgender" and "abortion" as the current moral panics driving right wing discourse & legislation.
Freedom of speech is recognized as a universal human right throughout the world, and American political philosophy considers many rights mentioned in the Constitution as applying universally as well.
For those that don't believe me, go try to have a discussion as skeptic of accuracy of Jewish deaths during WW2. I'm not saying they're right, but there are several things you can flat out go to jail for in the several countries just for talking about.
I'm assuming your definition of free speech is the absolute variety. If so, no country, including the United States, has ever recognized freedom of speech as having no limits, making it a useless definition in the context of this conversation. There are always limits, everywhere.
But it's obvious that European countries have a concept of freedom of speech, just one you personally don't consider valid. But like the guy said, that's just, like, your opinion, man. That concept is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, as well as the EU Charter, and probably whatever individual constitutions or bodies of law each country has. It was established before the US came up with the First Amendment, which was based on existing Enlightenment philosophy.
A bit of silly analogy but if a megaphone recorded everything about the person speaking into it and forwarded it to a semi-adversarial state, would banning that megaphone be a violation of freespeech?
It's one of those things that doesn't get noticed when it works well, which we hope is most of the time. That has an amusing side effect: the cases that people notice are the ones that they don't like—those stand out like sore thumbs—and this creates the feeling that the title edits are always annoying and wrong. Which is true, if you don't count any of the good cases!
Thus most of the comments about HN's title editing system (software + mods) are about how awful and obviously terrible it is, and comments like yours here are rarities.
In the end this is all priced in, so to speak, to HN's system. The main thing is that the front page be mostly free of misleading and/or linkbait titles and gimmicks. pg used to describe it like this: we want the front page of HN to look bookish. That is, it should look interesting to people who like to read, and look boring to people who don't.
It's an orange field of strange little holes in the ground. Some people would simply walk past and not wonder. Others, The Curious, would be compelled to stop and peer down one.
It's hard to find them these days, but some of the blogging about blogging/internet marketing crowd used to post data on headlines and what got clicks based on different sources like Facebook and Twitter.
Is there a precedent of app stores needing to enforce app restrictions on a state-by-state basis?
What if Apple protests and just disables their store in MT? It would only impact at _most_ 500k people (population 1mm at 50% market share, not accounting for demographics)
A huge number of angry Montanians who might vote their representatives out, but a rounding error for Apple.
Why would Apple do this to help a foreign company? They have nothing to gain except a small amount of app store fees. And they'd piss off a ton of Republican and some Democrat lawmakers, not to mention the 80% of their customers who don't use TikTok.
> A firm's refusal to deal with any other person or company is lawful so long as the refusal is not the product of an anticompetitive agreement with other firms or part of a predatory or exclusionary strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly. (emphasis mine)
IANAL, so I'm sure there are other laws I am not aware of that would squelch such a move.
They almost certainly don't want to set the precedent of caving in to a sub-national jurisdiction's bills when they don't even have any business operations in that jurisdiction.
Because then every state, province territory, etc., in the world will have an excuse. Since there are App Store users everywhere.
This is what lawsuits are for, not preemptive refusal to do business with an entire state.
It's a lot cheaper to code geographic controls (that they already have for national-level jurisdictions) than to only temporarily boycott even only 100k paying App store customers.
As long as they do the best they can to comply with the law they would likely be protected from judgement. Courts do not require unreasonable standards of compliance.
If phone users turn off their GPS location feature Apple can't be held accountable.
While I agree with the "no app is bigger than Apple," I'm not sure the TikTok ban is specifically about TikTok. This opens the door to each state doing similar things for whatever they want -- imagine Alabama banning period-tracking apps or California banning Parler.
I'm not convinced Apple or Google want to be in the business of state governments telling them what apps they can and can't sell. Although I do concede that they do this at the country level, so what's one more level of geo-restriction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's an interesting consideration. So if this were a company headquartered in Montana they could ban it, but if it's headquartered outside of Montana they can't ban it internally? Its a strange conundrum.
The interstate commerce clause has been stretched enough that even if ByteDance was based in Bozeman, and the Montana government still wanted to ban it for some reason, they might find legal obstacles.
My only consolation in this shitstorm is that it's been expanded to include "all social media applications that collect and provide users' personal information or data to a foreign adversary, or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary."
So, yeah. I guess it's time to shut 'em all down.
Now we just wait for the "I didn't mean American companies" retraction.
Tiktok may not operate within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana. An entity violates this prohibition when any of the following occurs within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana:
(a) the operation of tiktok by the company or users; or
(b) the option to download the tiktok mobile application by a mobile application store.
Refers to a separate ban - just a gubernatorial directive - that bans TikTok from government devices:
> Last December, Gianforte banned TikTok on state government electronic devices. On Wednesday, he added that the ban would expand to include "all social media applications that collect and provide users' personal information or data to a foreign adversary, or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary."
That such bans don't include domestic companies spying on people and providing that data to domestic entities says everything about how bankrupt this whole thing is.
Please be clear what you're talking about. There's a difference between "service providing targeted advertising based off what it knows about you" and "service that sells data it has collected about you". The former wouldn't sell that data, because it's their most valuable asset.
I agree, this is a distinction without a difference, especially if your aim is to prevent influencing discussion and policies.
An ad targeted at "young democrats" and sending targeted emails to "young democrats" has the same effect (one could argue that the ad would be more effective since it's less easily filtered out)
Mainstream conservatives/Republicans swung hard in the direction of supporting domestic spying and surveillance in the early 2000s and have never swung back. They hate the government but (with some justification) assume that law enforcement is on their side.
Judging by their positions and actions, they don't hate government at all. They love government. They just hate it when government doesn't enthusiastically support what they want.
Given how much distrust there is of DHS/FBI among Trump supporters/GOP base, I’m not sure this is true; especially with many neocons returning to the Democratic Party they came from originally.
Elected GOP officials are a completely different beast from much of their own base.
I'm making a generalization that doesn't include every single element of the right, but these days the rhetoric against federal law enforcement has no chance of getting turned into policy. Distrust of government is an integral part of conservative rhetoric, and incidents like Waco and Ruby Ridge remain a cherished part of their mythology, but there's a big difference between the 1990s, when they were demanding investigations and limitations on the FBI's power to surveil and act against American citizens, and anytime since 9/11, when they have wanted the FBI to have more power to surveil and act against American citizens, even under Democratic administrations.
You wouldn't be able to get Republican support for reducing the power of federal law enforcement even if Joe Biden died and Kamala Harris became president. Maybe their paranoia would get sufficiently revived if they were facing a President-Elect AOC in 2024... but I'd rather not think about how they would behave under those circumstances.
That the US is illegally spying on its own citizens is bad, but not as bad as allowing an explicitly hostile, autocratic foreign power to turn a massive propaganda and surveillance platform on US citizens.
The US has many problems, but I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy than under a completely and explicitly unaccountable regime like the Chinese Communist Party.
It would be foolish to allow the CCP to abuse our liberal values in a way which undermines the security upon which liberal society depends.
The US has the grasp and reach to punish me based on things about my privately generated data. The CCP has the grasp but not the reach. They are entirely different threat models. Neither one is excusable, but the US spying on me is a lot more immediately applicable.
Also I find it funny to the point of parody that China is the country under an unaccountable regime when they are signatories to the Hague System. The United States and Russian Federation are not, and the US goes so far as to have an affectionately nicknamed "Hague invasion clause".
In my lifetime the US has invaded several countries and replaced their democracies with friendlier governments. I'm not sure how we get to stand on any moral high horse about "liberal values". I'm not sure how leaving Libya with open-air slave markets is reconciled under said values.
I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically than foreign ones, not least because our own government is at least on paper allowed to exist via consent of the governed.
I agree that these are all terrible things about the US which need to change, but at least we have the institutional tools to effect that change, if we can muster the political will. Any power the CCP establishes will be far more immutable and hostile to critique or adjustment.
CCP has extraterritorial police stations that regularly surveil the Chinese diaspora and have sent agents to assault individuals. It's particularly bad for expats with domestic families, expats are known to be challenged or coerced using the threat of harm to family members. It's especially bad for uighur and tibetan expats.
Here's the thing. The US has certainly done bad shit. By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action. And we see the effects of that: The current administration (so far) and the previous administration have not started wars in any new countries. Libya was less bad than Iraq was less bad than Vietnam. The direction of us policy is getting better. The direction of Chinese foreign policy is getting worse and their domestic policy is trending genocidal, and there is limited internal dialogue and thus less of a forcing function for amelioration (Hard to make that comparison since CR policies killed millions more than genocide, albeit indiscriminately)
> I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically
Yes, I hope that one day too, Chinese citizens can look at their country in as critical a way as us citizens can.
> By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action.
What kind of corrective action? The US has never faced any backlash for helping Brazil (my country) to maintain a dictatorship because of communism fears, for example.
Corrective action != Punishment. The US really doesn't seem to do as much of that stuff these days. It's very unpopular and not doing these things any longer is in bipartisan political discourse. Do you disagree?
The relevance from my perspective is that I'm much more alarmed by spying and manipulation by a hostile foreign entity which explicitly places securing its own power above all else, than I am by spying and manipulation by agents of the US government, which is explicitly founded on principles of transparency and accountability to its citizens and has many institutional guardrails intended to serve those principles, even if those guardrails aren't fully effective. At least in the US there is the ideological possibility of peacefully voting in representatives who would strengthen and improve those guardrails. That's not something an agent of the CCP is even supposed or motivated to think about.
The article I read in WSJ last night said otherwise. It said that the lawmaker who introduced the bill wanted to modify it to include that language but it was too late in the process to do so. The lawmaker believed having the language would have made it more easier to avoid legal scrutiny.
Yep, the "lets ban TikTok because they're foreign and might potentially misuse data." is a silly, shallow reaction that doesn't deal with the real problems and the known, not potential, issues. It seems like a distraction.
Data misuse is real concern. But TikTok is not the main problem, it's industry-wide. A good Data Protection legislation that applies to all, and is applied to TikTok if they warrant it (and also to FaceBook, etc) and the next social media that starts up next year, would be much better. EU GDPR style.
If none of these companies can live with that, then so be it, shut 'em all down.
I'm a bit perplexed that there seems to be minimal discussion on the complete technical absurdity of this ban.
Within the USA, there might _possibly_ be sufficient technical infrastructure available to block app downloads at a national level. Maybe. And leaving aside the myriad circumvention routes.
But at the state level? It's simply not there in the way that the legislators think. Application-level data? Turn off location services. GeoIP? Nice try- mobile carriers don't reliably egress in the state from which the customer traffic originates. E911? Protected by other laws. Cell tower location? What about folks near state borders, and there's no reliable vehicle to get that data to app store operators right now anyway.
What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.
Effectively, to enforce this would require cooperation between government agencies, mobile carriers, and app vendors on a scale that has not be done in this country before- and with two of the three parties not even remotely interested in such cooperation.
Running with the billing address example... so to circumvent the ban, all one would need is a prepaid phone plan. Service addresses are collected for those, but they're basically unused and there's no incentive on the consumer end for them to be accurate.
Even on post-billed plans, getting the billing address from the mobile carrier to Google requires a degrees of cooperation that is not currently in place. Apple may have an easier time in the regard, but then again they're not likely to cooperate either.
That's a shame because in a world of artificially inflated 10-minute youtube videos, I really enjoy tiktok's to the point short clips. If I want to see a review or a how-to or similar, I go to tiktok first because they are from normal dudes and not big channels that artificially pad their videos to 10 minutes for the ads.
And TikTok has no influencers, sure? At least on Youtube, you can see who is paying them to shill you. Every video online is potentially there to convince you to buy something, believe something, or motivate you to do something to make the creator money.
I find the TikTok algorithm (perhaps not the platform) to be superior at giving me content I like/need and from creators that are (seemingly) authentic. I've seen far more diversity on TikTok than YouTube and due to there being no thumbnails or titles there is less clickbait.
That being said, TikTok's search capability is kind of useless.
Seriously. I just like tiktok for scrolling through guitar or cooking videos. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff on youtube, but it's fun just to just scroll through a few quick videos when you have a free minute. Those creators don't have to be trying to sell me anything, they're just getting me on the platform, then tiktok can show normal ads every few videos.
How do they regulate websites? Afaik tiktok can be used with full functionality through their website, although most people ofc prefer app. And even if they try to block the domain, folks can still VPN into it. Much easier to regulate apps compared to the open? internet.
Has the government provided a state-approved application that replicates what the consumers want from TikTok? If not, people will find a way around this like they always do.
More like TikTok itself, maybe? I mean they are (probably) not going after the providers for transporting the downloaded app. They just plain out ban any operation of TikTok in Montana, and how this happens does not matter much. Though, it may depend on whether they understand that there is no real difference on a technical level, between the website and the app. Could also be they realize their mistake and just stop it altogether.
My understanding was that the issue stemmed from having the actual app. Or at least that would make sense to me. TikTok has been surrounded by controversies since the beginning - many western countries, not just the US.
I may be just crazy but providing geolocation and biometrics of 100M+ US citizens to Chinese government just does not seem like a good idea. Also keep in mind that TikTok has the ability to curate content you see. Social media in general have been found guilty of influencing elections.
How does not having the app prevent geolocation? If you don’t give the app permission, all they get is you IP address. They would get the same information on the web.
Also, a web page can request your GPS permission just like an app can.
I’m willing to bet that majority people just approve all the permissions an app asks for.
Yes, web page can request your GPS as well, that is true. But a webpage won’t be doing it while the user is not actively using the page.
Also remember when Apple introduced origination about reading users’ clipboard and TikTok was one of the first ones that got caught red handed? I’m not iOS developer but I would not be surprised if there was more the app can gain from users devices.
And ios you have to not only explicitly give permission to your location, you also have to give it permission to allow an app to use your permission in the background.
This is why the "legislating from the bench" criticism always fell flat for me. America's legislative branch has been deadlocked for 40 years. History abhors a power vacuum. When one exists, the neighboring institutions will bend and stretch to fill it, distorting themselves and the whole power structure in the process.
I'm curious if TikTok will eventually attempt to give content about PRISM an algorithm boost to try and show that US companies are not better in terms of government data access. Might help keep users on their side.
Everyone is talking about the app stores, but the wording of the bill also seems to impose a duty on TikTok itself not to serve to users in Montana. That seems like the biggest sledgehammer here. I wonder about it's legality.
Mullvad has options to pay by cash, bitcoin, or even a physical gift card, in addition to the usual methods. There are no usernames, everything is tied to a randomly assigned account number. It's also moving many servers to a diskless infrastructure, running off ram and supports wireguard and openvpn.
I think TikTok could easily make over $10000 a day from its Montana Audience. Although this law likely violates the 1st amendment, perhaps the best course of action is to either ignore Montana or just cut them a check.
Why don't we make the analogy of TikTok to alcohol?
Did people of Montana voted for this or did Montana politicians follow their donors' agenda?
Is FB as dangerous or more dangerous as TikTok? Why target TikTok?
Lobbyists demanded it. Kentucky passed something similar earlier this year [0] - banning TikTok from state computer networks. An amendment exempted universities from the ban, but libraries are still blocked. It was signed by the governor on March 23 and went into effect that day[1].
1 - normally, state laws go into effect at the end of the year or end of legislative session (depending on the state constitution) unless there is an "emergency" in which case it goes into effect the day it becomes law.
I don't know if this is the right call, since it opens up a can of worms. Since it might affect free speech as a constitutional right it might make it to the Supreme Court, which might be interesting.
So, the way that it is enforced, is if the major app stores, do not remove TikTok, then they get fined a bunch of money.
> It seems TikTok would have no reason to pay for any fines from the state.
Well, ignoring the fact that this applies to app stores, companies can't just ignore court orders.
If they do, then their bank accounts could be frozen. US banks aren't going to ignore US court orders. Bank of America, or whoever, is going to give that money to the government, when it is ordered to do so.
I guess if Apple, and Google, want to shut down their US operations, then that would allow them to avoid the fines.
But, I expect they won't do that, and will simply remove those apps from their app store, for Montana residents.
Yes. It lists one single product. It tries to wrap some semblance of legality by referring to 15 CFR 7.4 (a list of foreign "adversaries"). If they really cared about such legality, they'd have banned every app from every country in that list (most of which would be illegal in the US anyway).
I'm never going to give a single crap about TikTok specifically being in the loving arms of the CCP as long as everyone else is just collecting my data anyway to either bombard with ads or sell to government entities. China is way down on my list regarding potential hostile actors to my personal welfare.
Frustratingly, Gianforte has so far lived up to all my expectations for him. I love Montana, it's a great and beautiful place to live, but hilariously the California liberal migration invoked a huge immune response turning an otherwise purple state deep red and sending them off the deep end. Sucks to see this happen.
Controlling what people think is key to stable society. Great to see the US learn from authoritarian regimes, a demonstration that two way exchange between different political systems can have positive outcomes
Nah, this is entirely our mistake. Our devices took away our ability to choose what we install, and now certain individuals get strongarmed like this and we lose our say. The shame is that modern society went 10 whole years thinking this was a smart move because Twitter wasn't shit and the news wasn't scary enough yet.
Let's aim higher! Who want to help build the SAP of social media?
Imagine selling a bespoke, turnkey solution to countries and companies around the world. Thinking about banning China from your Internet but your kids miss TikTok? We have something for you! On-prem, modular social media platform. Choose from ready made-modules:
- Interaction Styles - TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and many others.
- Regulatory environment - there's one for every major bloc on the globe! You can have your TikTok, and China can have its TikTok too! Comes with automatic GDPR support, updated daily to give access to latest discovered loopholes.
- Ideological Environment - a package of moderation, generation and monitoring tools, tailored to specific needs of your prospective users; choose from a wide set of ready-made configs - one for each major religious or political ideological group in every country on the planet!
- Monetization strategies - advertising? More advertising? Subscription and advertising? Pick and choose!
Let's do this! This is the endgame for social media and the Internet, so why wait for the world to go to shit, when we could drag it down to the gutter and make some money in the process?
The comments in both here and especially on The Verge is extremely hilarious. This only shows that even under Biden, TikTok was getting banned regardless of Trump being in office and that did not change the outcome of the ban.
Something better than a ban is to fine TikTok in the billions of dollars each time it repeats these privacy violations and pay all its users back the data it has collected, just like Facebook has done when the FTC fined them in the billions.
That seems to be fair for everyone instead of this wanton reactionary cope with little action other than screaming in the comments section.
Slightly off topic - I'm not sure I've heard the gov stating it plainly in the recent years: "the People's Republic of China is an adversary of the United States" (from the bill). Did I just miss it / glance over, or is this out of character for officially released gov documents?
A governor of s state =/= the federal government. the US Constitution vests the management of foreign affairs in the President. The Governor of Montana is just a public official expressing a private opinion, and has no official standing.
Consider the possibility that Greg Gianforte is angling for a cabinet job in a hoped-for future GOP administration, since his brash style is popular with many voters in that party, notwithstanding its sometimes criminal manifestation: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/12/532613316...
China should fall pretty quickly behind Europe as well this year. China's economy has fallen off the cliff - 80% decrease in foreign orders, 20% official youth unemployment rate, 50% reduction in home prices, 80% decrease in government land sales
China is no longer a partner to US, but a competitor and adversary. To Europe and Japan as well. China made that very clear when they announced unlimited friendship with Russia last year.
It's Russia + China + Iran vs Europe + US + Japan + Taiwan + South Korea + Australia + Canada
>80% decrease in foreign orders, 20% official youth unemployment rate, 50% reduction in home prices, 80% decrease in government land sales
I do not find these figures to be credible. They would an indicate a cataclysmic, wartime level sort of economic collapse that I see no evidence of.
Since you post this kind of stuff all the time, I can't help but feel that you have an axe to grind. Not that I would blame you for hating the Chinese government, but still... are you sure that you are not being irrational about its prospects?
I get the feeling you intended this quote as a gotcha, but it actually appears to be a manifestation of how they "walked it back" considering that "China's cooperation with Europe and other nations is 'endless'".
In my mind it's where we get the most stuff that we couldn't get elsewhere. Sure, we can harvest more or less hardwood, or import more or less from Canada, Sure, if we have issues with Guatemala we can buy our t-shirts from somewhere else. But if we want the devices that our information economy requires, there seems to be no where else to build them. Apple's attempts to build iPhones in India for example: https://www.firstpost.com/world/apples-india-production-face...
That line caught me as well - seems Montana at least has a designated enemy even if federal offices don’t state it that way.
However the DoD in their recent zero trust framework document basically pointed all the fingers at China as well.
Yeah. A lot of state and other local government are coming out with these policies as well. In Arizona we aren’t allowed to have TikTok on any government issued devices or on any device that accesses government resources (so personal device that you use to access work gmail or outlook).
They threaten regularly to go to war with us over Taiwan. People before WW1 thought war was impossible thanks to how the economy was so interconnected.
Russia invaded Ukraine despite how tied they were to Europe economically.
To suggest China can't be an adversary just because we trade is a blunder made many times in history, and it fails, time and time again. Don't fall for it.
No one is saying that China can't be an adversary. People are saying that maybe US politicians shouldn't be blatantly labeling them as an adversary just to score some sinophobic rageporn points with Fox News viewers.
> No one is saying that China can't be an adversary.
I think anyone who says they aren't is lying to themselves.
This is a far bigger trend than just some fox News viewers. Opposition to China has become bilateral and is very well supported by most in America.
You can only spend so long pretending to be a friend while also opposing the United States in basically every possible way until the United States wakes up and calls the quacking thing a duck. Seeing reality, we are burning bridges.
TikTok is one of those bridges. The chip export bans are another. Expect them to continue until China's trade with America resembles our trade with the soviets in the 80s.
They're mostly the same country they were 10 years ago. Compare the media coverage then and now -- they didn't change, we just ran out of war on terror and needed a new enemy.
Then don't compare the media coverage. Instead look at the actions of both countries. Read proposed legislation from US lawmakers going back almost two decades addressing the game theory between both nations. Read about the rampant IP theft that China has committed over the years, particularly in US-tax funded institutions. The US is simply planning ahead and severing ties which have kept us in a compromised position.
Sure, maybe some people are warhawking but most of the concerned people are focused on trade dependence and worried that China will take over Tiawan's production as a last resort. Is that an unreasonable view? What happens if they do decide to do that? Just let them do it?
> People before WW1 thought war was impossible thanks to how the economy was so interconnected
That is not why everybody thought war was impossible. The reason they thought war was impossible was the King of England, the Kaiser of Germany, and the Tsar of Russia, i.e. the major belligerents in WWI, were all cousins. They were Queen Victoria's grandchildren. Those weren't the only grandchildren on the throne who ended up taking up arms and entering the war. Given how a total of seven of the belligerents were related, including the 3 largest belligerents, nobody thought the family would go to war with one another.
Taiwan lacks nukes and China is rapidly building out it's nuclear umbrella. I believe they absolutely intend to try to use that same nuclear threat to enable their invasion of Taiwan without American intervention.
It can cut both ways, though. If your primary source for a crucial resource is a country that could potentially benefit from harming you, that can be strategically intolerable and eventually lead to finding an excuse to start a war.
A $250b/year trade deficit will weaken you over time while you might just be kicking the can down the road. The generation having to fight the war will have lesser chances of winning it.
Trade (especially massively imbalanced trade) with a communist dictatorship is not a good idea.
“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” - Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania
How does a hypothetical data collection warrant a ban, while a real illegal data collection associated with illegal voter manipulation and illegal campaign financing, like the Cambridge Analytica—a British company—scandal, doesn’t?
I imagine that they will go after the source. Basically Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft will have to hide the app in their respective stores for Montana users. That is, if there isn't an injunction before it even goes anywhere.
It's interesting that some oppose Musk running Twitter, it's moderation, policies, and alorithms because of his sympathies for a mainstream American political party.
And at the same time carry water for TickTock who is legally obligated to cooperate with China's intelligence service in any way they require. Knowing that the Chinese regime runs genocidal slave labour rape camps and will extract and sell your organs for free speech and religious practices.
I suspect that they don't realize that the CCP controlling the TickTock algorithms is more dangerous making the Q-anon shaman product manager for the algorithms at meta, Google, and Twitter.
> because of his sympathies for a mainstream American political party.
That's not generally why.
But I do agree to this extent -- if we're to be banning Tiktok, we should be banning all social media companies, foreign and domestic, that do the same as Tiktok does.
Maybe i am misunderstanding. Are you saying that a CCP controlled social media company is as bad to America as an Elon Musk controlled social media company?
different varieties/severity, neither good - arguably Musk is more directly harmful to Americans than Uyghur genocide, (which most Americans probably aren't even aware of) but it's not really an intelligent comparison and probably results in more distracting infighting than anything
My argument isn't that the Uyghur genocide is harmful to Americans.
My argument is that the regime that is carrying out the genocide is in control of the algorithms for a major social media company.
You perfectly prove my point when you have no problem realizing the impact on Americans control of a social media has in the case of Twitter, but are completely blind to the impact of TikTok.
I think you're reading a lot into very few words and I probably mostly agree with you. Both TikTok and Twitter have impacts, and neither have much to do with Uyghur genocide — that's a straw man.
Americans aren't oblivious to the genocide of the Uyghurs due to TikTok, they were oblivious before too. On the whole there's no impact on our daily lives from their plight, and as long as that's true it's going to continue having no bearing.
YouTube has radicalized people to jihadi terrorism and white supremacy, Facebook has promoted Rohingya genocide, Instagram is seemingly having a negative impact on depression and suicide amongst teenage girls... these are all problematic platforms regardless of regime... and that's before you get into more of the state-sponsored nonsense that the CIA and other do to spy on everyone regardless of which country they reside in.
I don't give much about the privacy arguments because Western apps also spy on us.
However it's good that we are finally responding to the unfair market conditions imposed by the Chinese government. Western app devs do not have the same access to the Chinese market as Chinese app devs have to the Western markets.
True, but the corollary is that Chinese people do not have access to as wide a range of products. So from the perspective of the freedom of the individual their situation is worse.
I hope that this shifts the Overton window toward discussion about banning facebook, twitter and instagram. They play a major role in exacerbating the divisions in the society and the rising suicide rate. Those domestic platforms do a better job at undermining the national security than any foreign force could dream of.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It is open to interpretation, but banning social platforms that do not create their content is not the same as censoring the press.
At the time the amendment was conceived, it was unimaginable to have a nation-wide entity that threatens the freedom of expression other than the government. So, it may actually be in spirit of the First Amendment to control the entities which promote and censor public discourse according to their opaque internal algorithms.
A platform that allows unhinged free speech would be more in line, but tech players wouldn't pursue it citing hate speech/advertisements and would outright ban it.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There is nothing there that explicitly grants private enterprises the right to store, sell, and manipulate your free speech.
>There is nothing there that explicitly grants private enterprises the right to store, sell, and manipulate your free speech.
... because the Constitution limits the government. It doesn't grant rights to private enterprise or the people (of which private enterprise is a superset.)
Note the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which explicitly state that the rights listed in the Constitution are not exhaustive, and that all such rights not enumerated in the Constitution are granted to the states and the people.
So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and "manipulate your free speech" (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself, a right which is neither defined by, and which cannot be limited by, the First Amendment to begin with.
Although yes, there are limits even within the US, those limits are usually very strictly scrutinized. Banning all major social media platforms because "They play a major role in exacerbating the divisions in the society and the rising suicide rate" on the basis that the Constitution doesn't explicitly say you can't is blatantly contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment and the whole philosophy of free speech in American law.
> Note the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which explicitly state that the rights listed in the Constitution are not exhaustive, and that all such rights not enumerated in the Constitution are granted to the states and the people.
That’s wrong on the Ninth and Tenth: the Ninth Amendment says that enumerated rights don’t limit other rights of the people that exist (the purpose of this was that the Constitution wasn’t a “blank slate” document, there was law existing before it which established rights, and Ninth Amendment was to make clear that the Constitution did not extinguish them, it doesn’t give anything at all to states; the Tenth Amendment, which does address states, says all powers (not rights) not granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.
> So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and “manipulate your free speech” (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself
No the right to conduct commerce that relies on doing this is not inherent in either the First Amendment nor is such conduct of commerce, insofar as it has an interstate character, protected from federal regulation by the 9th and 10th Amendments, because regulating interstate commerce is an explicit power of Congress.
I mean, even given how badly the Commerce Clause has been abused at this point, I'm incredulous that it should allow the government to ban social media platforms at will simply because bits travel through the series of tubes across state lines.
Particularly since, if that were the case, porn would have been banned under that rationale ages ago. If free speech protects the likes of Larry Flynt and Vice it obviously protects Facebook and Twitter.
Note: Ninth Amendment isn't legally meaningful, just morally meaningful.
The authors believed in natural God-given rights. They didn't want a certain rights being legally enforceable to give moral carte blanche to everything else.
The legal applicability of the Ninth Amendment is similar to that the Preamble.
This subject is precisely why the first ten amendments weren't in the original.
> One of the arguments the Federalists gave against the addition of a Bill of Rights, during the debates about ratification of the Constitution, was that a listing of rights could problematically enlarge the powers specified in Article One, Section 8 of the new Constitution by implication...This proposal ultimately led to the Ninth Amendment.
> Professor Laurence Tribe shares the view that this amendment does not confer substantive rights: "It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution."
What's the alternative interpretation? A blank check to SCOTUS to strike down Congress citing whatever "rights" they thought of that morning?
Of course not, and thus Ninth Amendment has virtually never been cited in a (successful) court decision. For the simple reason that it doesn't state anything actually enforceable by the courts.
The first amendment doesn't necessarily protect being-an-incredibly-invasive-and-creepy-stalker-with-an-eternal-memory (but "at scale", which apparently makes it OK somehow?)
The business model is what would be at risk, not Facebook's free speech.
There's nothing in the law, as far as I am aware, that requires an otherwise banned enterprise be allowed to operate because it also allows people to speak freely on the premises.
It's the beginning of States waking up and helping protect citizens privacy when it comes to technology. Sure this is a one-off directed at TikTok, but Montanan's have a constitutional right to privacy that's being violated daily by technology companies. Another great bill to check out is by State Senator Daniel Zolnikov regarding consumer data privacy. I'm optimistic for a future where I have a legally enforceable right to privacy. Specifically one where I can use modern technology without the depraved acceptance I'm giving up my digital privacy.
While a dupe, there are thousands of users reading this site sporadically - I've been on here over a decade and have never seen either previous discussion. The site's fresh out of 1990 design is hostile towards navigation of anything beyond a few pages of comments. If people discussed this enough in the other 2 threads, they can... gasp.. skip the discussion here.
so let me kick it off then. What exactly does this mean? To illustrate my point, let's change the scenario. There's a small town north of Chicago called Skokie. 100k people. Lets say they pass a "law" to ban some app from Google's play store.
People in Montana should perhaps take their phone, ask it what a computer is, listen to Siri's answer, then call 411 and ask them how to open a pdf. Then they should shovel some cow dung - as is daily life - and finally then they can pass some laws about cow dung.
Here are the takeaways:
* It'd be easy for Apple and Google to prevent downloads of TikTok for most users, which would also include app updates, as they have a significant amount of knowledge of users' locations and could prevent most users in Montana -- even those using a VPN -- from downloading the app or updating it.
* It'd be very difficult for Montana to enforce the other piece of the TikTok ban -- if "entity" in the bill means any company, they're stuck: the state has little ability to prevent side-loading of apps on Android and users who want TikTok can access app repositories hosted out of state. There's virtually no way for ISPs inside Montana to surveil all user usage to find out if they're trying to download TikTok from a third-party repository, and even if they could there would be legal issues with the state mandating this.
Fundamentally, this makes user privacy and security much worse.
* Apple, Google, and ByteDance could be aggressive and use the data they have -- all three have GPS data for most or all relevant users here (i.e. TikTok users on an iPhone or Android) -- and block requests to download or use TikTok from within Montana. And they probably will, unless they get a court to block the bill.
The one thing the bill banning TikTok doesn't do is the one thing that is desperately needed: actually protect user privacy, by banning the collection, aggregation, sale, and use of fine-grained user data -- by ByteDance, Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other.