Why should the government be able to control which apps people in the United States install and use on their own personal phones? What happened to "personal liberty and freedom"?
Are they going to ban particular websites next? And what exactly is so threatening about TikTok to make it a legitimate national security threat? Is China going to simultaneously track what Walmarts users shop at and implant Manchurian Candidate messages into the users brains? At best, this is an extreme and short-sighted proposal. Political posturing, wasting time and attention while solving no real problem.<p>What an uncomfortably Orwellian move.
I think TikTok is a garbage app that numbs the mind of the already willfully ignorant people, but I absolutely do not support the idea of banning it. The US is supposed to hold itself up as a beacon to other countries on the core ideas that people are free to express themselves and as function of that expression choose which peoples to listen to, even TikTok trash.<p>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.<p>As much as I distain TikTok as an aggregator and disseminator of information it should easily fall under the classification of the press. It's clearly speech and an assembly of the people. Unfortunately the same twisted minds that established the FCC and said "on a radio (iphone of the day)" you do not have freedom of speech but only freedom to listen to government licensed actors will likely be able to use their evil ways to ban TikTok. Which effectively means that all content on the internet can be arbitrarily regulated FCC style. This is a massive step towards the US adopting Chinese style information suppression policies.<p>Every US citizen should be aware of the UN and adopting. While these do not carrying the force of law they were written in modern times and they absolutely express the sentiments of the founders of this nation around many issues. This is very clearly detailed in article 19.<p>Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Currently living in Hong Kong and the whole “we have to ban <foreign media X> to protect our ’national security’ and citizens from subversive ideas from the scary foreign adversaries” bears a striking resemblance to the national security laws the CCP enacted in HK and used to effectively end press freedom and democracy.<p>You could replace some specifics and have a plausible ccp/hkgov press release
Im not a tiktok user or really care. Part of me thinks it would be fun to watch what happens if tiktok got banned in the US. it just seems ridiculous, the reasons for it seems like something out of a tv show.<p>There's another part of me that falls for a slippery slope, it could be a bad precedent to start banning foreign stuff, like we could end up having a US only internet
That's cool, considering banning apps now for regular citizens.<p>On a technical note, I wonder how this will be implemented. China was probably a pioneer in this with the Great Firewall. Russia created a shitlist of websites in 2012 that gets passed down to the ISPs that want to keep their license (for now easily bypassable with VPN, but I'm pretty sure that can be tightened if needed).<p>So I wonder how this is going to work. Will Google Play, AT&T and them receive a regularly updated list of apps and websites that citizens are censored from seeing? Kind of like OFAC for the banks? Will there be any consequences for people who decide to ruin national security by bypassing this garbage and sneaking some tiktoks into their lives?
I heard it had something to do with this..<p>"US officials have raised concerns that the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to hand over information collected from users that could be used for intelligence or disinformation purposes."<p>Oddly Atlassian/Jira has the same issue. Australia has something called assisted access. So a developer at Jira could alter the encryption or face jail. And they wouldn't even be able to tell their boss about the "order".<p>No idea how these two things are different in any way.
I don't like the Government is controlling what social media app users can use. This is as much as information control than anything else.<p>But I'm torn, I think banning this app will be a positive for hundreds of millions of attention spans across the world.