I was browsing around this evening and ran across a piece from Glenn Greenwald in which he complains that a clip from his streaming news show was removed from TikTok—apparently because he called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a "corrupt, authoritarian oligarch." Glenn goes on to suggest that this might have happened due to influence from the US government.
I doubt that, because I frankly doubt that our national security establishment cares what Glenn thinks about Zelensky. However, Glenn also linked to a recent article from Reuters about the more general battle over national security between TikTok, based in China, and the US government.
Long story short, TikTok is working hard to appease the US. It has contracted with Oracle to store all its US data. It has created a group called the United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection. And it has agreed to allow Oracle to inspect both its client-side and server-side code to ensure that nothing fishy is going on.
This is all fine, just part of the usual tug-of-war between the US and China. But there's also this:
TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including...a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions....TikTok has also proposed to form a "proxy" board that would run the USDS division independent of ByteDance, the sources said.
....The USDS board would have three members who would be screened by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a national security panel, the sources said. ByteDance would not have control over the board and its decisions even though it would pay for the USDS division's operations, the sources added.
Unless this is a sloppy mistake, it implies that a board appointed by¹ government agents would oversee a TikTok division that handles content moderation decisions.
Nobody has agreed to this yet, but would it be unusual if it happened? Obviously the US government has all sorts of agencies that oversee foreign activities, but do we have agencies like this one that, in principle, could be signing off on specific decisions about what speech a foreign platform is and isn't allowed to host?
I don't know. Any ideas out there?
¹"Screened by" = "appointed by" for all practical purposes.
When it comes to China and its government, any and all manner of unAmerican extremism is now justified, including, ironically*, becoming more like the CCP itself.
*I don't think many Americans during the McCarthy era** got the irony, either.
**History may not repeat itself, but it sure as fuck rhymes.
Orban would be proud.
Hmm you mean like the FCC puts limits on free broadcast speech?
Separately storing data sounds more like a GDPR response than a national security response.
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Is there any way to turn off this crap? I realize the quantity of spam is way down, but I'm greedy, and want none at all.
You knew the answer before you typed the question.
This has only one purpose, and that is to immunize TikTok -- and, by extension, its stakeholders, whomever they may be -- from any possible future US criticism, by putting the US Government's fingerprints on every level of TikTok's US operations and internal policymaking. In other words, it is a trap; and there is no one in Washington too smart to fall into it.
It's less complicated than that. They don't want to be banned. I'm not a lawyer and can't pronounce with confidence as to whether or not the government has the authority to do this, but my guess is they surely do*. Courts generally give the government a wide berth when it comes to national security. Especially (these days) when it involves Red China. TikTok's US business would easily be destroyed if Americans ISPs were forced to block the site, and US app vendors were forbidden from providing it to US customers.
*They didn't get away with it on Wechat, but I doubt the same legal arguments would be effective in the case of TikTok. In the former case, plaintiffs claimed—not unreasonably IMHO—that banning Wechat amounted to arbitrary discrimination against an ethnicity—Americans of Chinese heritage—who widely use the app to communicate. And they could cite the numerous anti-Chinese statements uttered by the then president.
I hope the US government runs, not walks, away from this at top speed. Content moderation is not the issue we are having with TikTok. Spying is. Getting the US government involved permits *more* spying, not less.
Per its website, CFIUS has a very high-level membership and is supposed to review and decide on what looks like an immense range of foreign investment in this country. I assume that like a lot of other federal agencies it can take a range of actions including outright bans and imposing of conditions on transactions and enterprises. I think, btw, that we have a bunch of agencies like this and afaik moving big amounts of money into the country and setting up big enterprises, especially tech-related ones, gets the hairy eyeball in a bunch of ways. It isn't like a resident filing papers at the local secretary of state's office to run a business from home.
I am not a lawyer or international trade person but it looks like there could possibly be a colorable argument for CFIUS to get involved in something like this way, at least initially, and depending on whether there's precedent for it.
But it would be a really bad idea, and I agree with Doctor Jay and frankwillhoit.
I know nothing about TikTok but I'll bet anything it's a fount of "information" about covid, vaccines, crypto, insurrections, etc. I have a feeling making the issue "China can't steal your data because the US government is in charge of what's on there!" is a devious -- and smart! -- ploy to keep the cash cow putting out lots of "milk".
Glenn Greenwald? Who's he?
And if someone were to post a video featuring Winnie-the-Pooh?
This idea is flatly unconstitutional. In essence it means that the US government is overseeing the content moderation for the US customers of a social media company. So they offer us the chance to censor our customers our way while the censor theirs in their way.
The Chinese really don't understand us. They think our problems are due to insufficient discipline--decadence as they put it--when in fact our opinion chaos is by design.
Glenn Greenwald is a self-absorbed nutbar motivated primarily by his seething hatred of America. Why would you bother to reading anything he writes?
Very good question!
Totally agree. Greenwald is nuts.
Greenwald is a force for bad in the world. He poisoned the mind of one of our best friends and sent our friend over the edge. 🙁
I clicked on the Greenwald piece that Kevin linked to. Didn't take me long to find places where he directly lied about what his sources said. What a worthless POS.
Of course, the ongoing mystery is why Kevin continually reads and comments on Greenwald, Matty Useless, and the WSJ among others.
It’s a trap!
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-a-trap
"do we have agencies like this one that, in principle, could be signing off on specific decisions about what speech a foreign platform is and isn't allowed to host?"
If we can believe the Twitter files, we already have at least one that oversees what US platforms are allowed to host (or "requested" to remove).
I don't think that “screened by” is the same as “appointed by.” For example, we say that judges are appointed by the President, and I think that is meaningfully true even though the Senate gets a veto. But if the proposal is adopted, the screening criteria should be subject to public scrutiny and debate because I imagine that the screening power could be misused.
ByteDance is a Chinese company, accustomed to dealing with the Chinese government, and they are offering the US government the kind of deal that they would normally use to appease their own government. This is what happens when you are familiar with one system - you assume others are the same.