The U.S.House passed a bill Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the U.S. TikTok is a video sharing app used by some 170 million Americans and is owned by a China-based company. The vote was 352-65 with Democrats and Republicans splitting on the bill. The bill faces an unknown future in the Senate.
All Illinois Republicans in the House voted for the bill (Bost, LaHood and Miller). Four Illinois Democrats voted against the bill (Garcia, Jackson, Ramirez and Schakowsky), while all remaining Illinois Democrats voted in favor (Budzinski, Casten, Foster, Kelly, Krishnamoorthi, Quigley, Schneider, Sorenson and Underwood). Votes by all other House members are here.
The bill’s future is subject to an important debate about free speech and national security, with opinions split not just within each party but within factions of the left and the right.
We will be writing soon about that debate.
Free speech and government censorship will also take the national stage next week when the United States Supreme Court holds oral arguments on the all-important Missouri v. Biden case (now called Murthy v. Missouri). That’s about the U.S. government directing tech platforms to censor and carry the narrative favored by the government as we described earlier.
-Mark Glennon
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Banning any platform is wrong, TikTok is not as harmful as Facebook and Youtube shorts is basically a TikTok copy. Should the government have the power to ban platforms? No! Whats next? Twitter, Rumble, Southfront, anyone that utters a viewpoint that goes against the government narrative I guess is what they want. This bill is the start of the coffin to bury our freedom of speech. America needs to be more afraid of what is being fed into brains by our woke universities. If China is leveraging woke thought through TikTok, well, they didn’t invent the woke transgender thought. Our… Read more »
Democrats are banning their voters’ favorite social media platform which will anger their younger voters! Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot!
The bill is a bad bill. It doesn’t address TikTok. Yes, it talks about foreign ownership. But it also pertains to any website the President feels is a “danger” because of “misinformation”. It’s blatantly anti-Free Speech and won’t possibly pass Constitutional muster. Do you really want to give Dementia Joe that kind of power against websites that allow speech critical of him?
There are problems with how the bill is written, which I am still looking at, but I think you have it upside down on the free speech and First Amendment issues. If our government censors or forces its narrative on a tech platform, there’s a First Amendment violation. When China does it with TikTok there’s no violation and no recourse. That must be fixed somehow. We have long had prohibitions on foreign ownership of US media, and this seems no different — in concept, at least. And those restrictions are permissible under our First Amendment — it’s a national security… Read more »
It’s supposedly narrowly tailored, the sources familiar with the bill insist. The freedom of speech issue is certainly one aspect, but the other is that the reality on the ground, that the algo has been intentionally designed to push kids into trans and drug content. WSJ did an article on this a few years back, and paraphrasing, if you watch 100 videos in a row, it nearly always takes you down rabbit holes of transgenderism and drug use and other weird socially disruptive issues. I’m willing to throw my principles out of the window to defeat the commies who are… Read more »
All true. And my real point is that you don’t have to sacrifice your principles, nor do I as a free speech hawk. The bill would have to meet a standard that’s based on generalizable principles to meet legal challenges, and I think it could if drafted properly. (And I have yet to look at exactly how it is drafted.)
“TikTok is a Chinese owned company. So if the president of TikTok says ok, I want to destabilize youth in American. I want you to screw them up. They know everything about you. So if you look at the difference between TikTok in China, and TikTok in America, 60 minutes did a report about this. And 60 minutes said TikTok in China is like the spinach version, where it’s showing kids traditions, and showing kids how to do-it-yourself stuff, and how to be a man, and how to be a woman. Where if you look at American TikTok, it’s depraved,… Read more »
The fact that people from the Wuhan district weren’t allowed to travel to other areas of China but were free to travel abroad when covid began tells us all that we need to know about China.
Word has it that Rumble has offered TikToc an offer to buy them, but of course the Chicago news outlet says nothing, the Federal Government is doing this because they cannot control the content and sensor it.