Miscellaneous News

Chevalier said:

The shakedown lobby head Greenblatt freaking out over TikTok’s ability to inform the masses and counter Anglo Zionist propaganda

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zbb said:

They want to ban TikTok from app stores operated by American companies Apple and Google, which essentially is a worldwide ban.

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FriedButter said:

They can’t go too hard on unpopular decisions. Biden being wiped out is one thing but those decisions will ricochet back at the Democrats being wiped out the house and senate if they try bluffing their hand too much.

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Temstar said:

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This is rapidly approaching Admiral Kuznetsov

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plawolf said:

TikTok’s business model is advertising money, twerking American youth doesn’t generate any actual money, it’s the ad money American companies paid to get their ads in from of their target demographic that generates the revenue for TikTok.

A US ban would in effect become a world wide ban since most large international companies would be loathed to pay TikTok to advertise their goods and services would fall fowl of US long arm jurisdiction BS and their weaponisation of the USD and financial system.

This is why the ban will be a big deal, and will require proportional responses from the Chinese government to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t become routine.

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Stierlitz said:

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Civil society groups say that even if the bill's actual text doesn’t directly censor TikTok or its users, it still has the ultimate effect of doing so.

"There's no denying that it would do just that," said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. "We strongly urge legislators to vote no on this unconstitutional bill."

The bill’s primary mechanic – setting up a choice for TikTok that could lead to a ban – is really a sleight of hand that courts will see through instantly, according to First Amendment experts.

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Ken White, a First Amendment litigator at the law firm Brown White & Osborn, said courts can and do look at whether the functional effect of a law is to stifle speech, not just what the text of the law says. Lawmakers may try to say the bill regulates TikTok's foreign ownership, not content. But, White said, "'foreign influence' aren't magic words that get you out of First Amendment problems. It's not at all clear that Congress' fig leaf of an excuse will work."

An important part of First Amendment scrutiny will be whether lawmakers could have achieved their goals through a "less restrictive alternative" to a flat-out ban, said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Passing a nationwide privacy law regulating how all companies, not just TikTok, handle Americans' data would lead to the same result without raising First Amendment concerns, he said.

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Setting that aside, courts have held that Americans have a constitutional right to receive foreign propaganda, even if the U.S. government doesn’t like it.

By that precedent, it would be unconstitutional for the government to ban TikTok even if it were blatantly a direct mouthpiece for the Chinese government, Jaffer said.

"If you give the government the power to restrict Americans' access to propaganda," he said, "then you've given the government the power to restrict Americans' access to anything the government deems to be propaganda."

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Curiously, however, Trump this week came out against a TikTok ban, saying in a

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that it would only empower Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom he described as "a true Enemy of the People!"

It’s not clear why Trump abruptly reversed his stance on TikTok. Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, who will likely take on Biden in this November’s election.

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Temstar said:

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This is rapidly approaching Admiral Kuznetsov

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