Biden Signs TikTok Ban Bill; Expect A Lawsuit By The Time You Finish Reading This Article
from the the-nonsense-will-continue-until-the-apps-improve dept
Get your dance moves on now, as TikTok may be going away. Okay, it’s not going away that quickly and quite possibly isn’t going away at all, but President Biden signed the bill this morning that requires ByteDance to divest itself from TikTok, or have the app banned from the Apple and Google app stores.
The law gives ByteDance 12 months to divest, but in all likelihood sometime today or tomorrow, TikTok will file a well-prepared lawsuit with high-priced lawyers challenging the law on a variety of different grounds, including the First Amendment.
As you’ve probably heard, the bill was tacked on to a foreign aid funding bill, and there was no way the President wasn’t going to sign that bill. But even as ridiculous as it is to tack on a TikTok ban to foreign spending support, Biden had made it clear he supported the TikTok ban anyway. Still, it does seem notable that, when signing the bill, Biden didn’t even mention the TikTok ban in his remarks.
We’ve discussed this a few times before, but the move to ban TikTok is particularly stupid. It demonstrates American hypocrisy regarding its advocacy for an open internet. It goes against basic First Amendment principles. It overreacts to a basic moral panic. And it does fuck all to stop the actual threats that people justifying the ban talk about (surveillance and manipulation/propaganda).
It’s particularly stupid to do this now, just as Congress was finally willing to explore a comprehensive privacy bill.
The NY Times has a big article about the “behind the scenes negotiations” that resulted in this bill that (bizarrely) makes it sound like the TikTok bill is an example of Congress working well:
For nearly a year, lawmakers and some of their aides worked to write a version of the bill, concealing their efforts to avoid setting off TikTok’s lobbying might. To bulletproof the bill from expected legal challenges and persuade uncertain lawmakers, the group worked with the Justice Department and White House.
And the last stage — a race to the president’s desk that led some aides to nickname the bill the “Thunder Run” — played out in seven weeks from when it was publicly introduced, remarkably fast for Washington.
This leaves out some fairly important elements, including powerful lobbying by companies like Meta (who were clearly threatened by TikTok) to spread a moral panic about the app. It also leaves out the massive financial conflicts of many of the lawmakers who pushed for this bill.
Either way, the bill is going to get challenged and quickly. Previous attempts to ban TikTok (one by former President Trump and one by Montana) were both rejected as violations of the First Amendment.
While this bill is written more carefully to try to avoid that fate, it’s all a smokescreen, as the underlying concerns still very much implicate the First Amendment. The only real question is whether or not the outrage and moral panic about “CHINA CONTROLS THIS APP!!!!” will lead judges to make exceptions in this case.
The bill still has fundamental free speech problems. First of all, banning users from accessing content raises serious First Amendment questions. Second, requiring an app store to stop offering an app raises different First Amendment questions. Yes, there are cases when the US can force divestiture, but the remedies in this bill raise serious concerns and would create a very problematic precedent allowing future Presidents to effectively ban apps they dislike or possibly force their sale to “friends.” And that’s not even getting into what it does in terms of justifying censorship and app banning elsewhere.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, china, joe biden, social media, tiktok ban
Companies: bytedance, tiktok
Comments on “Biden Signs TikTok Ban Bill; Expect A Lawsuit By The Time You Finish Reading This Article”
The bill was written in a way that “there is this careful process where the president may lay out a case detailing the specific threat to national security, except for TikTok and companies owned by ByteDance, this just applies to the automatically”.
The part of the bill explicitly referring to TikTok doesn’t really even make a national security argument, it more or less just says TikTok has 270 days that can be extended once by 90 days, while separately here is a process to use for apps that are shown to be specific threats to national security, as shown by a required public report submitted to Congress. Guessing the bill writers know this is a potential legal issue as there is explicit language that makes it clear that TikTok (or other companies owned by ByteDance) can be submitted through the other process if a court finds singling out TikTok to be unconstitutional.
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If the court decides singling out TikTok is unconstitutional under this law, wouldn’t imposing a separate condition for forcing a divestiture kinda be a defiance of the court decision? This seems like something that would contribute to invalidating the entire law, ’cause it seems like a dubious legal framework.
Again, the government would be on better legal footing if the bill didn’t contain a ban provision (by penalizing ISPs, web hosting providers and app stores that offer the app post-deadline), and the divestiture order imposed the fine for non-compliance on the company itself. At least that would probably survive a legal challenge.
The government’s case is also undermined because they probably can’t adequately explain why less restrictive measures (data privacy laws, mitigation measures like Project Texas, the latter seemingly subject to disagreements between the CFIUS members like what stalled any divestiture proposal) can’t be employed, that some lawmakers have argued the intent is to ban or change editorial policies that the U.S. prefers, effectively throwing in content/viewpoint discrimination to the basis for it (including Mike Gallagher, the bill’s co-author, who claimed like a few others that the app should be barred because of pro-Palestine content), and the government acknowledging publicly (and likely to Congress and Biden) that the threats asserted are hypothetical (one of the issues that sank Trump’s 2020 EO, as courts are less receptive to most extreme measures done on a national security basis if there’s no credible evidence that the threat is real/imminent and can’t be resolved in less restrictive ways).
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If the court decides singling out TikTok is unconstitutional under this law, that part can be scrapped without having to throw out the provision that deals with apps that actually present a threat to national security. Hence why it was included separately.
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troll
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If having sufficient reading comprehension ability to read legislation and see the intent behind why it was crafted the way it is makes me a troll, then I’m the troll under the bridge and you’re one of the three billy goats gruff. Now get the hell off my bridge or I’ll eat you!
You know for someone who is trying to be a more appealing alternative to Trump, Biden is doing a great job making Trump a more appealing option.
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How the fuck does that make sense? Trump tried to do exactly this same thing.
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Yes, he did, just not successfully, or at least not competently. Whereas Biden did, and it’s going to hurt him when it comes to appealing to younger voters. The youth don’t approve of his polices in the Israel-Palestine war, so how do you think they’ll react to when they learn that Biden successfully passed a potential ban towards TikTok, which is used by that generation overwhelmingly?
I do hope Biden still try to eke out a win in spite of this blunder. I just do not understand why he’s making this election more difficult for himself.
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It would potentially splinter the 18-34 electorate (which several polls show oppose a ban), with some staying home out of disillusionment over D.C. ignoring their policy views and some others entertaining candidates like RFK, Jill Stein and Cornel West.
If anyone (including one of Biden’s strategists, who thinks it won’t) thinks it won’t hurt him or other candidates among young voters, a survey of Black voters by ClearPath Strategies (probably the first to actually gauge the political impact of a ban) found that 51% of those polled oppose a TikTok ban, 24% would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported it and 77% favored data regulations applying to all social media platforms; extrapolate that 24% of 1,025 respondents to the broader 18-34 vote regardless of race/ethnicity, that could make the difference in some races (including Biden’s). Also note it’s still primary season, and given how Gen Z organizes on TikTok, any group could mount a campaign to get young voters to participate in upcoming House and Senate primaries to back challengers to incumbents who voted for the revised PAFACA and get them out in enough numbers in their districts to at least narrow their victories if not defeat them outright to show them those voters won’t be taken for granted.
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P.S. I’m still going to vote for Biden, it won’t be because I like him, it’s in spite of Trump.
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Biden can at least be convinced into doing somewhat better. Trump will always find a way to be worse than he was before. For all the problems I have with Biden, he isn’t promising to be a dictator or helping to turn back the clock on women’s rights by about two hundred years.
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Likewise, I also want Biden to win. But I do not understand why he’s making this election way harder than it should be.
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Dems believe in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and the right to kill jews
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There it is folks, the dumbest f–king thing you will read this month.
Biden hasn’t been convinced into do anything somewhat better since day one bucko. He’s been all-in on everything from expanding domestic spying, to rewarding police state abuse , to abusing refuges at the southern borders .
Because it’s only bad if Donnie does it.
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“Because it’s only bad if Donnie does it.”
I’m sorry that I missed that news item .. when did Biden sell our top secret documents to our enemies?
I also did not read about any claims of immunity for anything from the Biden administration.
Just wtf are you smoking anyways?
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Or wave them around in front of journalists as he ‘declassified’ them, or tear them up and flush the pieces down the john whenever he didn’t like what they said?
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fuck off troll
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Biden didn’t choose the must-pass nature of the foreign aid bill that this was attached to. He can’t line item veto and botching the Ukraine war would be even worse. Divesting TikTok doesn’t kill people compared to defunding the defense effort.
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I guess it might make Trump more appealing to people who don’t have the attention span to remember he tried to ban TikTok too.
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It doesn’t make Spray-tan Caligula look any more appealing, it just proves that liberals have always been conservatives with rainbow flag bumper stickers.
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troll
Woooo!
Now a few Americans can agree to sell all that data to someone else who can turn around and sell it to China.
Another point of its lack of constitutionality
I would say the TikTok ban is not only unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, but that it’s also a Bill of Attainder: It punishes a [corporate] person through congress without a trial.
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To date, only one case has ever established that Bills of Attainder apply to corporations. The Second Circuit held this in Consolidated Edison Co. of New York v. Pataki (2000) that the Constitution’s Bill of Attainder Clause applied to a New York State law signed by then-Governor George Pataki that barred ConEd from collecting fees totaling $200 million from customers to cover expenses related to an 11-month shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant due to cracked pipes from a steam generator.
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Hmph. Maybe I’m wrong.
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No, no, you’re supposed to double down and resort to ad hominems! How will the trolls ever respect you?
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The conservative wing of SCOTUS has repeatedly narrowed the definition of Bills of Attainder in recent years based on their views of “History and Tradition”, it’s no so tightly cabined that right now it pretty much only applies if it specifically names one person (i.e. not if defines a class so narrowly that only one current person fits it), and that it specifically imposes a direct finacial penalty or imprisonment.
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The Conservative (or rather, the ultra-reactionary) wing of the US Supreme Court has to ruin everything, just like they did for [insert issue here].
Congrats Biden.
You’ve just justified every other country in the world to block any app, site or voice they don’t like.
I hope whatever bullshit money you earned from this makes you sleep better at night, because the ret of the world isn’t.
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trump did the same thing
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Yeah, and look how that turned out. Two courts blocked it bc he misused the IEEPA in the manner this law is meant to carve out, and bc the government’s evidence didn’t show a credible threat warranting such restrictive measures and such threats illustrated were “phrased in the hypothetical” (as quoted by one of the judges presiding the lawsuits over the EO).
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When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When neither the facts or the law are on your side, pound on bullshit ‘two sides’ fallacies.
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Congrats Biden and Congress. (FIFY.)
And, yes… the U.S. can never chastise any country for blocking Internet access or platforms again, without having this law (and the way it was passed, in the manner how autocratic regimes would implement vague, easily abusable national security-based laws, against public opposition) being thrown in our faces. So, the U.S. has no moral ground on this issue any longer… even if/when the D.C. Appeals Court and SCOTUS strike the whole thing down as unconstitutional.
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TikTok and more internet regulations
Not surprised, but all you people who say you love Biden and Democrats and vote for them, these people are fools. Republicans always win elections when there is low voter turnout. No one is interested in voting for dinosaurs and President Biden just made things worse. I doubt this TikTok ban will survive court and I am sure Trump is pleased. It is becoming more likely Trump will win in 2024.
It’s funny democrat stations like MSNBC are afraid of losing Democracy yet favored section 702 of the FISA act. If Trump wins let him use FISA on the media, then we will see how much they favor APP and URL bans. TikTok will win in court and Biden will lose now. Funny thing is Biden says he will still use TikTok after banning it. Such a threat. BS. Facebook teams up with the Israeli lobby to ban TikTok. There efforts and President Biden remaining President after 2024 just FAILED
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shut the fuck up troll
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So, you prefer carreer criminals to career politicians? zjust imagine what it would be like if we had MORE CHOICES, like in a democracy?
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idk why there obsessed with trump
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Imagine believing there was a difference! 😂
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and theres the troll trying to be funny
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Trying and succeeding, unlike you, troll.
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said the low life troll who just confessed that there trolling
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Why are you talking that way to yourself? Have a flag to hide your shame.
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get flagged loser
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ok troll
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At least they’re succeeding, unlike you, troll.
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I hope you are not imagining that MSNBC is a NEWS organization. It’s an entertainment organization, where some of the entertainment is having talking heads talk.
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I don’t know anyone who loves Biden and you’re a fool if you think Trump would do any better. He had a chance and he showed us how petty and hateful and criminal he could be. He got hundreds of thousands of people sick or killed or jailed for believing his narcissistic self-serving bullshit. That anyone is willing to consider him again is entirely on them and the paint chips they ate as a kid.
It’s telling that you used the term democrat as an adjective instead of democratic. The democrat substitution is used by conservative propaganda sources. That you repeat it indicates your bias.
We sat through comments almost identical to yours before the 2020 election trying to scare voters. “You’re the reason Trump is going to win!” “If you keep talking about this, I’m going to vote for Trump out of spite!” People with your perspective were wrong four years ago. I’m not going to trust your perspective now.
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Ah yes, voter fraud, voter intimidation and insurrection, the favored tools of the Russian assets known as Republicans. Hilary still won the popular vote, mind you, and only lost because the Republicans has to pull every dirty trick in the book to EKE out a tiny win in 2016.
Bills of Attainder rarely do in America.
And as for the rest of your dribble, thanks for telling us you’re an insurrectionist.
Always wondered(not really)
(to much proof or interference)
Of Who is feeding the bears?
As there is so much BS floating around congress and the capital(is that why its called capitalism, Control of the Capital).
Fill those idiots, and pay them off to DO what the corps want them to do. Not Just corps, but Feeble minded groups with Enough power and pressure.
Wouldnt it be Better to regulate PRIVACY? Enforce DATA protection?? Waiting 1-2-5 years to hear about data breaches is SO STUPID, when it takes les then a day to see and locate it. AND IF A HUMAN is monitoring whats going on, TRACK AND TRACE IT.
Create a simple honey pot, or a small data bomb, that when opened by a program or what ever GOES PINGGGGG on the internet BACK to HOME. Use it as the KEY file for the encryption code, so it HAS to be opened.
When the sony servers got Terabytes of Data stolen I had to Laugh. How long did that take? No one noticed? No one had to Ping the machine or register the remote machine to make Sure if was SUPPOSED to have that much data access?
Since then there have been so many updates to the OS’s, that you need to pay for them 2-3 times over, and add the security payments YEARLY. And it still happens.
“Free market”, indeed. Next lie, please…
Re: free market
IMO.
Means it should have been free in the first place, but they cornered the market, and Made up a price.
Banning from app stores
… Isn’t the requirement that they be banned from app stores a separate, non-party, constitutional violation?
Banning the app being its own 1st/4thA problem for TikTok as “you generally can’t do business here”.
But to actually implement the ban, they have to tell a 3rd party to not host the app (or worse block via ISP), which is its own 1A problem… And one where the instructed party isn’t the one at issue.
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That’s a novel legal argument that should have been addressed in Montana’s attempted TikTok ban. I don’t think it’s been established that app stores, ISPs and website hosts have 1A protections to host platforms free from government regulation. Granted, Citizens United established companies have 1A protections, but that aspect needs to be looked into.
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Perhaps not “free from government interference”, but certainly “free from forcing association/disassociation”.
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Free from government regulation? No.
But hosting an app in a store (or a website generally on the internet) is a classic editorial/content moderation question, so any theoretical power the government has should be next to zero. It would be the equivalent to telling a bookseller they couldn’t sell a book.
“The law gives ByteDance 12 months to divest.”
Technically, the 12-month timeframe is optional (the main timeframe for covered apps to divest is nine months), and dependent upon whether ByteDance acquiesces to a sale and it is in progress during the period. If 12 months was a hard timeframe, it would actually give TikTok a sufficient timeframe to divest, since it takes six months to a year for a corporate divestment to be initiated or completed. (Note most divestiture requests made by the government usually have a deadline of 12 months, something that would be beneficial for TikTok’s case, given Grindr secured a buyer almost exactly one year after the CFIUS, under Mnuchin’s oversight, ordered the sale; so, the government needs to explain how they expect a complicated sale that few would be able to afford of a company worth at least $80 billion, under a law with an unclear definition of who would be considered a feasible buyer(s), can be completed in less than a year.)
A win-win. Just not for the US
Well done Biden and the people in congress that passed this, you just handed every country on the planet including the one you’re using to fearmonger all the excuse they could possible need to crack down on speech in their own country and return the favor should there be any american companies doing business in those countries.
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While it doesn’t solve manipulation/propaganda entirely, it would actually stop it happening via one avenue. Just because it’s not a full solution doesn’t make it ‘fuck all’.
Which would only solve the surveillance half.
What’s the difference between those cases?
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It can’t stop something there’s no evidence of happening. So it does fuck all.
Which is the only thing there’s evidence of.
Read the rest of the article, or one of the many other write-ups about this bill.
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“This isn’t happening” is a very different claim than “it would do fuck all”, and it’s disingenuous to conflate them. If you think it’s the former, just say the former.
Yes, but it’s not the only thing that people justifying a ban talk about.
I did, and it doesn’t cover them.
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ok troll
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And you’re the one who clearly does not want to wake up and smell the shit.
In order to put a stop to foreign psyops, the US would have to INVADE THE FOREIGN COUNTRY IN QUESTION. And preferably NUKE THE COUNTRY. Because as long as the foreign nation is a fucking soverign nation-state, it can and WILL conduct these psyops.
Rinse and repeat until all 192 countries are under the American flag via war and nuclear annihilation.
Banning Tiktok out of hypothetical, poorly-proven “concerns” is not going to change the fact that foreign nation-states have, can and will continue to engage in psychological warfare, JUST LIKE THE US DOES.
Or are you convinced that it’s okay if Rupert Murdoch does it?
Divesting Tiktok from its Cinese owner isn’t going to stop China from flooding the US with Russian disinfo. Crushing China does.
Is this what you want, a war with China?
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Explain how China would conduct a psyop via Tiktok. Explain these specific Tiktok concerns. And no waffling.
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The main concerns are that Tiktok could, for instance, block or derank certain topics in it’s algorithm, that China doesn’t want discussed. It could also promote particular views.
For example, in the past TikTok used to block discussions about topics like Tiananmen:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing
While there isn’t evidence that was being done as a psyop by China, it does show how that platform could (in theory, there’s no evidence yet that it’s still doing stuff like this, or that it was doing so in the past at the behest of the government) influence viewpoints.
Of course, we don’t know how (or whether at all) effective this would be. But a ban would mean not having to worry about it in the first place.
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ok troll
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Oh, good, let’s also dismantle Facebook under those “concerns”. Arrest Elon too, for ACTUALLY DOING THAT SHIT. OH, AND PRAISING THE FUCKING XI DYNASTY.
Surely that would assusage more of those “concerns” you have, you fucking Murdoch simp.
(We have evidence of Facebook and OLD Twitter doing just that, you know.)
And a Bill of Attainder, where there’s no evidence of China actually using Tiktok to do what you described, is the solution? When fucking Fox News is parroting Russian bullshit AND an entire party is doing the will of the Russians?
This isn’t India, Singapore, or Botswana. It’s the fucking US of A. You are asking that the US go down the slope of authoritarianism while “ignoring” the evidence happening right the fuck now. Because you aren’t willing to see WHY this shit happens.
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Right, because a solution that’s likely to be thrown out on the basis of unconstitutionality is an actual solution. 🤦♂️
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Whether it would be thrown out or not is different than whether it would actually work if implemented. Those are two different things.
And as noted, “likely to be thrown out” is not “will be”.
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shut up troll
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Shut up, c0cksucker!
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great job for showing us that your trolling
Is Biden trying to piss away the youth vote?
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If he’s not trying to throw the election he’s going a damn good job accidentally bumbling his way in that direction.
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Side note:
The article you’re linking to says the Trump ban was rejected for being arbitrary/capricious? It seems to have never gotten to 1st Amendment arguments.
Unlike the WeChat injunction which was done on 1st Amendment grounds, the injunction here doesn’t touch the 1st Amendment questions and just says that the Trump White House (even with presenting evidence under seal) totally failed to substantiate the national security threat of TikTok
So, the WeChat ban gets blocked on 1st Amendment grounds, and the TikTok ban gets blocked because the IEEPA doesn’t let the President do what he wants to do, and all of this is just performative nonsense anyway,
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Trump’s use of the IEEPA in that case violated the Berman Amendments meant to prohibit embargoes of First Amendment-protected materials (which the PAFACA effectively carves out for one set of the non-exhaustive list of materials in question, internet platforms), so the First Amendment considerations were kinda indirectly addressed there. (If the PAFACA is struck down, it should be determined whether it can be tailored to allow less restrictive monetary penalties directed solely at the covered company for non-compliance with a divestiture order under the preceding Berman Amendment protections, a “splitting the baby” approach that works with its limits on embargoes of 1A-protected materials.)
This ban will be bad for Apple because side loading apps is so much easier under Android.
And it’s bad for security because app stores are generally less likely than random sites to give you trojan versions.
I don’t want a TikTok account, but if courts don’t kill this, I’ll feel obliged to get one.
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I have to admit, I’m openly wondering what’s stopping someone like me from re-uploading the app onto my own site and pairing it with something like an MD5 hash to ensure its authenticity, then publishing instructions on how to sideload the app onto an Android phone. After all, my site isn’t actually an app store by any means.
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APK Pure is a site I’ve found to be trustworthy for sideloaded Android apps, and I believe they now offer iOS apps as well.
What goes around…
If TikTok prevails in a future first amendment case, I’m going to laugh my ass off when data brokers use the exact same arguments and precedent to save their business model.
There will never be a comprehensive data privacy law in the United States as there is no practical way to do so without running afoul of the first amendment.
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No, there will never be a comprehensive data privacy law in the United States because the people who pass the laws are funded by people who benefit from data collection.
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How does telling a data company that they either can’t sell customer data or has to severely limit the kind of data run afoul of the first amendment?
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HAHAHAHAHA. Have fun eating a shit sandwich and voting for this degenerate in Nov., Dems/progressives/libtards!! 😂
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I will have fun voting against Trump again, thanks!
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and you just told that your a troll scum bag who watches rightoid propaganda and so we should just flag your comment
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also thinks for leaking your email like the pathetic scum bag you are
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Which candidate aided an i surrection again?
Hint: It wasn’t Biden, puppet of Wall Street.
bill of attainder in disguise
A bill of attainder is where you declare someone guilty by passing a law saying they are guilty. This is exactly that except they arent saying tiktok did anything, but instead that tiktok might do something illegal sometime in the future. Even worse than a bill of attainder. Writing laws to punish someone you dont like is very wrong.
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You know, I learnt about somthing very similar to that recently.
It’s hard for the Biden administration to get much done with all that Yellen and Blinken going on.