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House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok (edition.cnn.com)

submitted 8 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226

The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.

US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.

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[–] retrieval4558@mander.xyz 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In case I'm being downvoted because you think I'm worried about a slippery slope for no reason, I'll link the full text of the bill here.

The process is basically that the president determines that an app is an issue, notifies Congress (who does not need to give approval), then within a certain time period the foreign owner of the all must divest ownership or it would become illegal to distribute that app.

There are definitions laid out in the text. I see nothing that would stop them from banning foreign news sources or potentially foreign shopping platforms except for the clause about "permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content", which could be broadly interpreted.

Do you really want to give the executive branch basically unchecked power to limit our access to voices from outside the country?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1

[–] pastabatman@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I think you're farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we've ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.

Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren't seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?

I think maybe the reason you aren't fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That's fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.