TikTok is pointing out that the US banning it in the country is an attack on free speech. This came after the bill banning it passed Congress.
Over the weekend, we reported on the TikTok ban legislation being tied to a bill that would supply critical aid to Ukraine. The effort to tie banning TikTok to Ukraine aid ensured that it would sail through the legislative process when other equally nonsensical bills failed to gain enough traction.
Over the weekend, the Ukraine aid legislation passed Congress. It is generally expected to pass the senate at some point as well, meaning there is really little stopping this effort at this point.
The legislation to ban TikTok has been backed by mainstream media fearmongering over the platform. That fearmongering says that China is using the app to poison the minds of American’s to behave in a way that benefits the Chinese communist party. Another part of the fearmongering is that China is collecting vast troves of personal information from the app and using it against the interests of the US. Large media outlets simply regurgitated these conspiracy theories without question for months on end. No one was able to come up with any evidence to back up these wild claims.
Eventually, US intelligence was pressed on what evidence was available to back up these wild claims. US intelligence ultimately came up empty handed, only relying on speculation and theories at most. Yet, this lack of evidence didn’t stop some lawmakers from being racist assholes by insisting that TikTok is some sort of Chinese conspiracy to undermine American democracy. It got to the point where that racism went viral after Senator Tom Cotton insisted that a Singaporean was somehow Chinese:
The exchange really showcased how evidence free the attacks on TikTok ultimately were. Of course, aided by the fact that we are increasingly living in a post-truth era, we now see a TikTok ban bill sailing through the legislative process backed by absolutely no evidence that such a ban would even solve anything, let alone address have any legal standing in the first place.
Tiktok, for its part, has issued a response to this insanity, pointing out that the banning of its platform would trample free speech. From the BBC:
A spokesman for TikTok denounced the bill, saying it “would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate seven million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24bn (£19.4bn) to the US economy annually”.
TikTok has said ByteDance “is not an agent of China or any other country”. And ByteDance insists it is not a Chinese firm, pointing to the many global investment firms that own 60% of it.
TikTok’s response really hits on a big part of what gets lost in these debates. There are plenty of people who use TikTok as part of a business. There are content creators of all shapes and sizes who are either using the platform as a hobby or as a way of generating revenue for themselves and the teams they employ. That, obviously, in turn, contributes back to the US economy because people are ultimately creating content consumers want. Banning the platform would very easily upend all of this and, in the process, consolidate online market power to the likes of Meta and Google.
Some might insist that those creators can simply move to the remaining players once their platform of choice is banned. The problem is that simply moving from one platform to another is anything but simple. We’re talking about very different platforms that operate differently. Adjusting to another platform is far from easy – especially when it comes to marketing and understanding how the underlying systems work. None of this is even hypothetical, either. We saw this last month thanks to India banning the platform. From TechDirt:
As the more recent NY Times article highlights, there was a real negative impact for Indian creators, even those who moved over to the big American platforms:
India’s online life soon adapted to TikTok’s absence. Meta’s Instagram swooped in with its Reels and Alphabet’s YouTube with Shorts, both TikTok-like products, and converted many of the influencers and eyeballs that had been left idle.
The services were popular. But something was lost along the way, experts said. Much of the homespun charm of Indian TikTok never found a new home. It became harder for small-time creators to be discovered.
Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy analyst in New Delhi, tracks the overall change to the departure from TikTok’s “algorithms, its special sauce,” which was “a lot more localized to Indian content” than the formulas used by the American giants that succeeded it.
Still, the NY Times piece suggests that once you get past all that, some former TikTok stars have succeeded on other platforms.
The WSJ article, though, suggests younger users in India are still angry about how all this played out and don’t feel particularly happy with what they’re left with:
Today, some of the platform’s fans in the South Asian country still mourn its absence. They say rival Indian services that sprung up in TikTok’s wake aren’t as appealing. While new short-video offerings from YouTube and Instagram have offered alternatives, some feel they lack TikTok’s allure. And some fans are still angry at the government for booting out TikTok.
This ultimately highlights the level of ignorance some people have in this debate. A lot of those who don’t use or don’t even understand TikTok are more likely to buy into these claims that TikTok is some sort of evil platform that is destroying America. The more you know about TikTok, the more the push to ban it becomes absurd. In the above example, we see how wrong these assumptions of just joining a different platform would lead to the continued success actually is. Some may find success anyway, sure, but others? Well, not so much.
The simple truth is that simply clicking an “upload” button isn’t automatically going to translate into overwhelming success overnight. What works on one platform may not work on another platform. Ultimately, banning TikTok is going to lead to enormous disruption for the creator economy – disruption that may not ever fully heal.
Either way, this legislation is going to invariably lead to a lawsuit. It’s hard to really visualize how such a ban is even remotely constitutional. Even if you think that lawmakers arbitrarily banning a particular platform would somehow manage to pass constitutional muster, such an effort is going to take time to work its way through the courts. So, even though it seems like little is stopping the bill banning the platform from passing, this is far from the final chapter of this story.
It’s not only unconstitutional on First Amendment (to the US constitution) grounds, it’s also unconstitutional in that it’s a bill of attainder, which was in the unamended US constitution.
That being said, if we had a functioning Supreme Court which actually followed the law instead of their bribes, they’d strike it down immediately.