As you may have heard, The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would give ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, about 6 months to divest itself of TikTok or the platform would be banned. President Biden says he will sign it if it reaches his desk. The bill is now in the Senate. Naturally, I was curious about what the legislation actually says. So I searched for "text of the legislation banning TikTok on Brave, DuckDuckGo and as a last resort Google/ There are dozens of stories saying the bill passed. But going two or three pages into the search results does not reveal the actual language. I had to go to X, formerly Twitter, to get this snippet of the bill: "The broad language in this bill can allow a President to designate any application or website “controlled by a foreign entity” and ban its access to American consumers.
Hm, that's pretty broad language that is effectively being hidden from the American public. Like, if the President decides that Twitter is controlled by that South African Elon Musk, he could ban it? Yeah, I know that's a stretch. But BS "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq led to the U.S. spending $8 trillion or nearly $25,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States. Not to mention 900.000 deaths. Predicting that when the neverending Authorization of Military Force bill was being debated would have been a bigger stretch.
Make no mistake, this is a censorship bill pure and simple. Even the major argument being made for the ban is pro-censorship. Censoring China. For what it's worth, the text of the First Amendment is still relatively easy to find. It says "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."
You noted the part about Congress making no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, right? If banning TikTok is not a clear example of abridging freedom of the press, words have lost all meaning.
What are we hearing from the legacy media and all social media platforms save X and TikTok itself? Crickets. They've all long since made their deal with the devil. Parrot the government line in exchange for light regulation and being first in line to get hot "news" tips.
Even the supporters of this legislation are reduced to arguing hypotheticals: China is maybe spying on TikTok users. Or China is propagandizing our youth. They may be spying. There is no hard evidence, but it could be happening. Sort of like what Facebook does to us all the time and then forwards the information to the U.S. intelligence agencies. And spreading ideas that disagree with the government narrative is kind of why freedom of the press exists in the first place.Back in the days before the internet, the government had de facto control over the big three networks and the New York Times. It was able to control the narrative. The freedom of expression that blossomed on the early internet took that away. The political class is desperately trying to get it back.
If you actually think it will make a difference in the Senate vote, call your Senator, former SEIU Labor leader and Emily's list President, Laphonza Butler or former LA City Council member Alex Padilla, both, by the way, appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Good luck.