Melllvar

Not exactly the same problem. In the same way that gun control doesn’t address the problem of hostile foreign militaries. Yes, both involve guns, but the laws and policies that address one are inapplicable and inappropriate to the other.

The law in question addresses the problem of foreign adversaries having easy access to manipulate US public opinion. The law you suggest addresses the problem of advertisers having that access. Both are serious concerns, both need to be addressed, but they are not the same problem and the solutions are markedly different.

require every company operating within the US to show users exactly what data is collected and allow them to delete any or all of it as desired

That would be a very different kind of law from the one we’re talking about.

That’s a separate issue that could not be addressed with this kind of law anyway.

Can you explain why you feel that would even be necessary?

I’ve actually read the law, so no one has to tell me that it really, actually is about privacy. I know that it is.

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Chew responded to the latest moves in a video posted by the official TikTok account. “Make no mistake, this is a ban,” Chew said in the video. “A ban on TikTok and a ban on you and your voice.”

Narrator: it wasn’t.

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Or else what?

The only difference between TikTok and other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram is that TikTok is Chinese owned.

The law would also appy to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

The US government demanded access to the US based social media companies to pull whatever sensitive information they wanted. They just don’t want China to have the same access.

Or Russia, Iran, or North Korea.

Those companies are already based in the US.

I read the bill.

The question is irrelevant to whether this bill is a good idea.

Musk’s companies are already based in the US. The issues you raise, however valid, are not really relevant to a discussion of this bill.

I think there’s definitely a case to be made that recommendation algorithms, etc. constitute editorial control and thus the platform may not be immune to lawsuits based on user posts.

We’ve been covering many stories about a potential TikTok ban, including how unconstitutional it clearly is, how pointless it clearly is, and how even those who back it don’t seem to have a good explanation of why, beyond some vague handwaving about “China.”

The bill isn’t nearly as bad as they want you to think. It bans companies in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran from operating social media apps in US markets, forcing them to sell if they already do. These four countries are already restricted from accessing sensitive parts of the US economy, with forced sale being a legal option. Really, the only novel part of the bill is applying these kinds of restrictions to software.

And the bill doesn’t actually punish or restrain users’ speech. It does restrain the social media company’s speech, but that may not be enough to overturn the bill on 1st amendment grounds. If you understand that social media exists to collect vast amounts of user data then you must also understand how the government has a legitimate interest in keeping that data out of an adversary’s hands. The only real question is whether the government has a compelling interest, because that’s the standard that a court would apply to this bill. And I daresay it might.

Maybe it’s catastrophic and they’ll never come back.

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I wouldn’t hang my hat on that statistic until after autonomous cars make up a significant portion of cars on the road.