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Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

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Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#71

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

No matter what you think of this ban, the court is obviously not the right place to solve it. It is completely unsurprising that this is a unanimous decision because foreign trade is one of the few powers expressly given to the federal government in the constitution:

>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]

(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#72

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

dralley wrote: post #49

It isn't a "ban" except that TikTok would rather shut down than sell, forgoing billions of dollars in the process.

From pure PR perspective, it is a win for China; sometimes it is not about the money. US used to be much smarter those kinds of optics.

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#73

Post by hedora »

tptacek wrote: post #28
briffle wrote: post #21

Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

The whole case turns on foreign adversary control of the data.

That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...

Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:

https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...

And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:

https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...

Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#75

Post by njovin »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #39
briffle wrote: post #21

Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.

Then China would just fall back to bombarding them with propaganda on one of the other large social media platforms that are prone to both known and unknown influence.

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#76

Post by Aaronstotle »

jdlyga wrote: post #22

People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge,…

There are plenty of other places they can upload that content.

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#77

Post by oorza »

diggan wrote: post #4

> Although Trump could choose to not enforce the law Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance. > The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security conce…

Where was this line of thinking when it was Obama ordering the DEA to not enforce marijuana laws? Where is this line of thinking when it's a city that chooses not to enforce dog breed restrictions?

The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#78

Post by mschuster91 »

briffle wrote: post #21

Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.

Re: Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

#79

Post by kube-system »

briffle wrote: post #21

Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

The concern isn't broadly that "social media companies have data". The concern is the governing environment that those companies operate in, which can be coopted for competing national security purposes.

This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.

The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.

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