SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
tiktok ban
As Trump Signs TikTok Order, Critics Sound Alarm Over Corruption and US Propaganda
One watchdog leader noted that the president's deal involves "one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
Sep 25, 2025
President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order claiming to "save" TikTok from a federal law that would ban the video-sharing platform in the United States, but critics are condemning the Republican's deal as yet another case of him "picking winners and losers in government policy based on who is enriching his family."
Trump initially kicked off efforts to force TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest with an August 2020 executive order, but Democratic former President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan legislation that would ban the platform based on national security concerns last year.
Since returning to office, Trump has pledged to "save" TikTok, delaying enforcement of the law and negotiating a deal under which, according to a White House fact sheet, the US application "will be majority-owned by US investors, operated in the US by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, and subject to strict rules to protect Americans' data and our national security."
The fact sheet also confirms that "ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock as required by law," and "Oracle—one of the nation's leading technology companies—will act as TikTok’s security provider and independently monitor and assure the safety of all operations in the US."
Critics have expressed alarm about both the anticipated quality of the US platform and the reported investors.
OpenSecrets noted Thursday that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison is "a Trump supporter and major bankroller of Republican candidates and causes," and the company "has spent at least $11 million on federal-level government lobbying during each of the past four full years," a trend that is set to continue this year.
Citing unnamed sources, CNBC reported Thursday that, in addition to Oracle, the main investors will be Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX. Previous reporting has also suggested involvement from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Trump on the TikTok deal: "Rupert Murdoch is involved."
[image or embed]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
While some opponents of the Trump plan have highlighted his ties to Ellison, Andreessen, and Horowitz, Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, focused on his relationship with MGX in a Thursday statement.
"President Trump's use of his office to enrich himself and his friends seems to know no bounds," Carrk said. "His grand scheme to 'save' TikTok just so happens to involve the enrichment of one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
"That's no coincidence for the only US president in history that has seen his bottom line grow by billions from the White House," he asserted. "Meanwhile, working Americans see their costs continue to increase, from groceries to healthcare to housing. It's clear the president's priority is himself, not the rest of us."
Trump's Thursday order affirms that the deal complies with last year's law and allows another 120 days to finalize the details.
The Associated Press reported that "Trump said Thursday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has agreed to move forward with it. However, the Chinese embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to an AP inquiry seeking confirmation that China has formally signed off on the proposed framework deal."
US political leaders have long claimed that under ByteDance's control, users may encounter content favored by the Chinese government. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said earlier this week that "if the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for US government propaganda."
Joining Trump in the Oval Office for the executive order signing on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance seemed to confirm that's the plan, telling reporters that "the US company will have control over how the algorithm pushes content to users, and that was a very important part of it."
Responding to Vance's remarks, one social media user quipped, "Ahh, so it was just an issue of *whose* propaganda."
Keep ReadingShow Less
America's Darkest Comeback Tour: From Racehorse Theory to Resistance
Throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference.
Jan 23, 2025
As we enter U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, a chilling convergence of digital theater and eugenic ideology is unfolding before our eyes. Two days before the inauguration, millions watched their TikTok accounts flash warnings across their screens—only to see them restored hours later with Trump positioned as their digital savior.
This orchestrated crisis wasn't just political theater; it was a test run for what was to come. Millions of Americans, including young people whose identities have been shaped by endless scrolling, saw their dopamine withdrawal weaponized into a demonstration of power, foreshadowing a presidency that would soon explicitly embrace the pseudo-scientific theories that once fueled the darkest chapters of American history.
The choreography continued at Trump's pre-inauguration rally on Sunday, January 19, where the aesthetic was deliberately carnage-red: red banners, red caps, red lights casting a deep red glow over the crowd speckled with cowboy hats. Against this blood-tinged backdrop, Trump spliced scenes from Full Metal Jacket with TikTok clips of drag queens, weaponizing confusing and false contrasts to signal his vision of "restored masculinity." Ever the entertainer, Trump showed scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket to represent a past that never existed, feeding his audience a hollow nostalgia for an America that never was. Kubrick had made that film for the exact opposite reason that Trump chose to flash the scenes across the screens. Full Metal Jacket makes graphically visible the brainwashing of young men by hyper-masculine expectations of war.
The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible.
But it was his moment with Elon Musk and Musk's young son that revealed something more chilling. When Trump praised the child's inherited intelligence, invoking "racehorse theory," he wasn't just expressing admiration for the person who is arguably the greatest influence on the sequel of his presidency—he was broadcasting a eugenic worldview that has haunted American history since the 1920s. This was not the first time that Trump has evoked this pseudo-scientific theory at the root of the Holocaust. For a nation built by immigrants and by enslaved persons, his rhetoric about "cleansing" the country of what he terms "criminal illegals" from countries like Congo and Venezuela represents an existential threat to the very diversity that has always been America's greatest strength.
We've seen this before in American history. When eugenic ideologies took hold in the early 20th century, they found fertile ground in institutions across the country, from elite universities to state legislatures. Today, as Trump explicitly returns to this language, we're watching history's shadow lengthen across our democracy. The same pseudo-scientific racism that once justified sterilization programs and immigration quotas now powers algorithms and influences policy. With Elon Musk standing next to him, Trump promoted eugenics hours before he would become president again. Then, during the inauguration on January 20, while Trump was at a distinguished luncheon surrounded by tech oligarchs, Elon Musk stood before Trump's most fervent fans and raised his hand in a salute that cannot be compared to anything but a Nazi salute.
It is harrowing to stand on the precipice of this slide toward authoritarianism and white supremacist dehumanization. Yet throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference, to build connections in spite of–and sometimes because of—the forces trying to divide them. As social media platforms owned by oligarchs become instruments of division, our resistance must be rooted in physical spaces of community. When we look at our neighbors—in urban centers, rural towns, and suburban streets—and say, "I see you, I hear you, I stand with you," we're preserving the human connections that authoritarianism fears most.
The path forward lies not in Trump's dystopian vision of genetic superiority, but in the mutual aid networks sprouting up across the country. These grassroots communities of care and solidarity represent the most radical spaces of resistance available to us as we face the challenges ahead. They embody not some mythical American spirit, but the real and difficult work of building connection across difference—work that has always happened in the shadows of our nation's darker impulses.
In this moment of crisis, while Trump orchestrates the terrifying sequel of his reality-TV presidency—manufacturing crises, staging spectacles, and exhausting our capacity for outrage—we must remember that democracy has never been a destination but is a messy, imperfect journey. Behind each choreographed distraction, real policies of dehumanization take shape. Yet even as the entertainer-in-chief commands center stage, communities continue their quiet work of resistance and mutual support. The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible. Our task now is to continue this long journey toward justice, not by following every performance, but by strengthening the bonds between us. We must build these connections before they can be severed by the politics of division and spectacle. Let's find each other. Let's hold on to each other, let's hold on for our lives, and each other's lives.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The TikTok Ban Is Discriminatory and Unlawful. Here’s Why.
What Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required. That is racial profiling and an affront to the Constitution.
Jan 17, 2025
Today, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s wrongheaded decision to ban TikTok in a unanimous decision. The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday January 19, 2025.
Ahead of this misguided ruling, 15 racial justice nonprofits submitted an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, explaining how the TikTok ban violates the rights of 170 million U.S. users and echoes a disgraceful history of anti-Asian racism.
It is no secret that our government wrongfully uses “national security” as a weapon against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Stop AAPI Hate’s research highlights how the government routinely scapegoats our communities for economic downturns, public health crises, and national security threats—often without any evidence.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same.
In the case of TikTok, the government claims that a ban is necessary to protect U.S. national security against China. However, the government also filed an affidavit in open court, signed by a senior U.S. national security official, stating there is “no information” that China had ever tried to use TikTok for nefarious purposes in the United States.
In other words, what Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required.
That is racial profiling, plain and simple. And it is an affront to the Constitution.
It is disappointing, though unsurprising, that our government is targeting Asian American communities solely because of our race and national origins. Since our nation’s founding, our government has repeatedly trampled on the rights of Asians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups by relying on so-called “national security” concerns as a basis for outright racial discrimination.
Take, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and government-sanctioned racial profiling and surveillance of innocent Muslim communities following the 9/11 attacks. More recently, we saw the China Initiative, a Department of Justice operation from 2018 to 2022 that unjustly targeted Chinese and Chinese American academics, ruined careers and livelihoods, and chilled scientific research.
Every time the government insisted that such laws or programs targeting Asian Americans were necessary, it reinforced the pernicious “perpetual foreigner” stereotype or the idea that all Asian people in America are inherently suspicious and disloyal to the United States based on our ancestry, skin color, or religious faith.
Those laws and programs were based on fearmongering and scapegoating. All three branches of government—the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court—eventually admitted that Japanese American incarceration violated the Constitution. Both the House and the Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. And the DOJ eventually shut down the China Initiative, acknowledging it perpetuated a discriminatory double standard against people with any ties to China, though President-elect Donald Trump wants to revive it.
Our government never seems to learn and instead continues to pass laws motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, like this TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban has real human costs. The ban will silence 170 million U.S. users, including communities like ours that rely on TikTok to build solidarity, share valuable information, practice their faith, and engage in free expression.
But what worries us even more is how the TikTok ban fuels hateful rhetoric and actions against Asian Americans. It is clear that Congress targeted TikTok because the company is Chinese. Other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube collect vast amounts of user data and have had major privacy and security issues—yet the government is not applying the same level of scrutiny on those companies.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same. We saw this exact ripple effect of hate during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, then-President Trump spewed racist, anti-Asian rhetoric blaming Chinese people for the virus, fueling a torrent of hate against AAPI communities. In fact, from 2020 to 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,000 reports of hate acts in which offenders mimicked Trump’s language. His rhetoric emboldened people to spit racist vitriol at our community members as we shopped for groceries, dropped our kids off at school, and took the bus to work. They shouted that we were diseased and told us to go back to our country. Since our founding in March 2020, we have received over 12,000 reports of anti-AAPI hate acts from across the country—and we know racism and discrimination increase when politicians target our communities.
That’s why AAPI communities must tell our leaders that we disagree with the TikTok ban. This decision is not only an affront to our civil liberties and free speech, it is also an affront to our safety. We need leaders who will defend our rights and safety—not strip it away.
Keep ReadingShow Less
A Court Upheld the TikTok Ban, Proving Trump’s Not the Only Threat to Press Freedom
Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power.
Dec 11, 2024
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).
But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A U.S. District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.
Censorship for Freedom
Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).
In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”
Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:
The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”
He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”
Two-Fifths of the Nation
But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black, and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State (Intercept, 11/21/24).
With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media… pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.
For example, The New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.
In order to advance Beijing’s “goal… to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.
But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica, and The Intercept.
Flimsy Security Concerns
Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.
And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off U.S. airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.
The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok
accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S.
To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.”
But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Flawed and Dangerous': US Appeals Panel Upholds Potential TikTok Ban
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad."
Dec 06, 2024
First Amendment advocates on Friday criticized a U.S. appellate court for upholding a law that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company does not swiftly sell the social media platform used by an estimated 170 million Americans.
Signed by President Joe Biden in April, the law gives ByteDance until January 19 to divest from TikTok. Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the parts of the law considered by the panel "do not contravene the First Amendment" nor other parts of the Constitution of the United States.
"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary's ability to gather data on people in the United States," Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in an opinion the company is expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Responding to the decision on social media Friday, Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said that "the D.C. Circuit's decision today to uphold the TikTok ban is enormously disappointing. If allowed to stand, it would give the government far too much power to restrict Americans' speech online."
Jameel Jaffer, who was on a friend-of-the-court brief as director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, issued a similar warning after the ruling was released.
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad," he said. "I hope the D.C. Circuit's ruling won't be the last word—and I doubt it will be."
Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, also looked ahead to the next court fight.
"The D.C. Circuit decision upholding the TikTok ban will immeasurably harm the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in the U.S. and globally who use the app to create, to share information, to get their news, and promote their businesses," she said in a statement. "We hope the next phase of review of this misguided and overbroad law will be a chance to right this wrong and prevent it from going into effect."
In addition to arguing the law is unconstitutional, attorneys for TikTok and ByteDance "have claimed it's impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically,"
The Associated Press reported. "They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm—the platform's secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan—would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office one day after the law's divestment deadline, previously supported banning the platform, but during the latest campaign, he pledged to try to "save TikTok." According to The Washington Post:
Trump is expected to try to halt the TikTok ban, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department, said Trump could take any of three actions to help TikTok fend off the ban: persuading Congress to repeal the law, directing his new attorney general not to enforce it, and declaring that ByteDance has satisfied the statute by performing a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok.
Although the president-elect hasn't yet weighed in on the new court decision, on Thursday he shared on his Truth Social platform a post-election overview of how his campaign performed on TikTok.
While Trump may move to preserve TikTok in the United States, civil rights attorney and Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo noted that the court decision's "terrible precedent" is also a concern as he returns to office.
"This will be a test of the U.S.'s ability to shut down access to websites they dislike," Caraballo stressed. "Really bad to do with Trump in office! We could enter a new era of government censorship."
Keep ReadingShow Less
TikTok Sues US Government Over 'Unconstitutional' Potential Ban
One expert said legislators' admissions "that the ban was motivated by a desire to suppress content about the Israel-Gaza conflict will make the law especially difficult for the government to defend," said one First Amendment expert.
May 07, 2024
A top First Amendment expert on Tuesday said TikTok has a strong case against the U.S. government as the social media platform filed a federal lawsuit against a potential ban—particularly since proponents of the law have admitted it is aimed at blocking Americans' access to news out of Gaza.
The platform filed the lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nearly two weeks after President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversaries Act into law as part of a larger foreign aid package.
Under the law, TikTok parent company ByteDance, a Chinese firm, has 270 days to sell the platform, allowing it to continue operating in the U.S. If it does not sell TikTok, the app will no longer be available on U.S. networks and app stores.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, Republican lawmakers including U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have linked TikTok to the burgeoning anti-war protest movement spreading across the U.S., with the latter saying in an interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Friday that "there was such overwhelming support" in Congress to shut down TikTok because of the frequent posting of Palestine-related content on the app.
"Restricting citizens' access to media from abroad is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, so it's sad and alarming to see our own government going down this road," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on Tuesday. "TikTok's challenge to the ban is important, and we expect it to succeed. The First Amendment means the government can't restrict Americans' access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here."
"The fact that some legislators have acknowledged that the ban was motivated by a desire to suppress content about the Israel-Gaza conflict will make the law especially difficult for the government to defend," Jaffer added.
The law's sponsors claim it "is not a ban because it offers ByteDance a choice: divest TikTok's U.S. business or be shut down," reads the lawsuit. "But in reality, there is no choice. The 'qualified divestiture' demanded by the act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally."
Even if selling the app within the time frame was feasible, added TikTok and ByteDance, the law "would still be an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power," ultimately allowing Congress to "circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down."
"And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content—an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution's commitment to both free speech and individual liberty," the plaintiffs continued.
At The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday, columnist Will Bunch noted that about a third of Americans between the ages of 18-29 get their news from TikTok, according to a recent Pew survey—as Romney openly stated he fears last week.
As Bunch wrote:
During the war in Gaza, most mainstream Western journalists have been blocked from entering the war zone. The best source of real-time information is often the phone video of airstrikes and their aftermath either shot by Palestinian journalists—more than 90 of whom have been killed—or civilian bystanders. Look, there's disinformation about every issue on social media—it's a serious problem. I'm a clueless boomer myself about TikTok, but I do spend way too much time on X/Twitter and I can tell you exactly what is radicalizing young people about Gaza.
The reason so many under-30 folks have adopted the Palestinian cause isn't disinformation, from Hamas or China or anyone else. They've been radicalized by the truth—daily videos of young children, some of them bloodied, some of them already dead, covered in dust and targeted by 2,000-pound dumb bombs made right here in America.
"If the real motivation for zapping TikTok from your phone is to silence legitimate political speech, just because a lot of members of Congress don't like it," wrote Bunch, "then this bill is the worst attack on the First Amendment since the government was sending World War I critics like Eugene V. Debs and Kate Richards O'Hare to prison, more than 100 years ago."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza
A conversation between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Republican senator offered an "incredible historical document" showing how the U.S. views its role in the Middle East.
May 06, 2024
A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an "incredible mask-off moment," with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government's long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories—and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans' access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza.
At the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday, the Utah Republican asked Blinken at the McCain Institute event's keynote conversation why Israel's "PR been so awful" as it's bombarded Gaza since October in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 34,735 Palestinians—the majority women and children—and pushing parts of the enclave into a famine that is expected to spread due to Israel's blockade.
"The world is screaming about Israel, why aren't they screaming about Hamas?" asked Romney. "'Accept a cease-fire, bring home the hostages.' Instead it's the other way around, I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What's happened here? How have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?"
Blinken replied that Americans, two-thirds of whom want the Biden administration to push for a permanent cease-fire and 57% of whom disapprove of President Joe Biden's approach to the war, are "on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond."
"And of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative," said the secretary of state. "We can't discount that, but I think it also has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative."
Romney suggested that banning TikTok would quiet the growing outrage over Israeli atrocities in the United States.
"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature," said Romney. "If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
The interview took place amid a growing anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S. and around the world, with American police forces responding aggressively to protests at which students have demanded higher education institutions divest from companies that contract with Israel and that the U.S. stop funding the Israel Defense Forces.
Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have suggested students have been indoctrinated by content shared on social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram, and wouldn't be protesting otherwise.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who co-sponsored a recent bill to ban TikTok—included in a foreign aid package that Biden signed late last month—said last week that "there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists."
"It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you're seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.," said Lawler.
Social media has provided the public with an unvarnished look at the scale of Israel's attack, with users learning the stories of Gaza residents including six-year-old Hind Rajab, 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, and victims who have been found in mass graves and seeing the destruction of hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure.
U.S. college students, however, are far from the only people who have expressed strong opposition to Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians and large-scale destruction of Gaza as it claims to be targeting Hamas.
Human rights groups across the globe have demanded an end to the Biden administration's support for Israel's military and called on the U.S. president to use his leverage to end the war. Josep Borrell, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in February lambasted Biden and other Western leaders for claiming concern about the safety of Palestinians while continuing to arm Israel, and leaders in Spain and Ireland have led calls for an arms embargo on the country. The United Nations' top expert on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories said in March that there are "reasonable grounds" to conclude Israel has committed genocidal acts, two months after the International Court of Justice made a similar statement in an interim ruling.
Romney and Blinken didn't mention in their talk whether they believe social media and bad "PR" have pushed international leaders and experts to make similar demands to those of college students.
The conversation, said Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, was an "incredible historical document" showing how the U.S. government views its role in the Middle East—as a government that should "mediate" between Israel and the public to keep people from having "a direct look at what's happening."
"Romney's comments betray a general bipartisan disinterest in engaging Israel's conduct in Gaza on its own terms, preferring instead to complain about protesters, interrogate university presidents, and, apparently, muse about social media's role in boosting pro-Palestinian activism," wrote Ben Metzner at The New Republic. "As Israel moves closer to a catastrophic invasion of Rafah, having already banned Al Jazeera in the country, Romney and Blinken would be wise to consider whether TikTok is the real problem."
Enterpreneur James Rosen-Birch added that "Mitt Romney flat-out asking Antony Blinken, in public, why the United States is not doing a better job manufacturing consent, is wild."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Be Worried About the Push to Ban TikTok Over Palestine Solidarity Posts
The current rhetoric against TikTok is not only a hypocritical attack on free speech, it’s an insinuation that the only reason people could be critical of Israel is manipulation by a foreign government.
Nov 14, 2023
Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Communist Party, took to the web publication Free Press (11/1/23) to sound the alarm: TikTok’s Chinese ownership meant that a dangerous foreign power was using social media to sway public opinion against Israel. His solution was clear: It’s “time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.”
This is interesting for a few reasons, but chief among them is that the Free Press was started by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, one of a handful of conservative journalists who banded together to assert the federal government exerted too much control on Twitter before it was acquired by Elon Musk (NPR, 12/14/22). The company’s liberal corporate governance, they asserted, had suppressed conservative ideas (Washington Post, 12/13/22).
Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government.
Weiss even signed the Westminster Declaration, a vow to protect “free speech”: “Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices,” it said. These “large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government.
Censorship by the Wrong People
Gallagher said that “TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about 6 in 10 Americans are hooked on the app before their 17th birthday.” This is worrisome, he said, because TikTok “is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
This brings Gallagher, and other GOP lawmakers, to the conclusion that the U.S. must ban TikTok. “We are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he said—suggesting that censorship isn’t altogether wrong, it’s just wrong when committed by an undesirable entity. He pointed out that “for a century, the Federal Communications Commission has blocked concentrated foreign ownership of radio and television assets on national security grounds.”
This indicates that Gallagher, in the name of anti-Communism, doesn’t think the market should decide which media consumers can access. Instead, this must be highly regulated by a powerful federal agency. So much for his commitment to “get big government out of the way.”
‘Massively Manipulating’
He’s hardly alone. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), who once blasted (10/20/20) what she saw as censorship against conservative voices at Facebook and Twitter, called for a ban (NBC, 11/1/23), saying “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) concurred, saying in a statement, “For quite some time, I have been warning that Communist China is capable of using TikTok’s algorithm to manipulate and influence Americans.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) wants a ban (UPI, 11/7/23), and the New York Post editorial board (11/6/23) approvingly cited Gallagher’s Free Press piece.
Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has called for punitive action against Harvard University students who made pro-Palestine statements (Wall Street Journal, 10/11/23; Business Insider, 11/5/23), “said TikTok should ‘probably be banned’ for ‘massively manipulating public opinion’ in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus,” the New York Post (11/1/23) reported.
CNN (11/5/23) also insinuated that TikTok is skewing public opinion and reported that the Biden administration is monitoring the situation, saying the president’s aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content.”
The concept that the Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel, is no laughing matter.
If this freakout about TikTok seems selective, that’s because it is. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and antisemitism have run amok on the platform (Washington Post, 3/20/23; LA Times, 4/27/23), but congressional Republicans and their journalistic allies on the social media beat aren’t clamoring for an intervention into the mogul’s extremist influence on U.S. discourse.
Republicans have been looking to ban TikTok, howling about its Chinese ownership, since the Trump administration, but the call became all the more real when the state of Montana banned the app completely (FAIR.org, 5/25/23). TikTok is banned on U.S. government devices (CBS, 3/1/23); in liberal New York City, the same is true for city government devices (NPR, 8/17/23). Given all that, the concept that the Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel, is no laughing matter.
Media Moral Panics
Some of this vitriol toward TikTok is purely cynical. The Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that “Facebook parent company Meta,” a major competitor to TikTok, worked with “one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.”
But the history of U.S. politics has been defined by periodic moral panics about the subversion of American values through media. The Grant administration took tight control of the U.S. Postal Service out of fear that sexual content circulated through the mail was degrading the nation’s moral core.
The advent of film spawned local and state censorship boards throughout the country, starting with Chicago in 1907. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that film was “a business pure and simple,” and thus not protected by the First Amendment—a decision not reversed until 1952. In the mid-20th century, anti-Communist zealots in the House of Representatives persecuted numerous Hollywood writers and actors, based on the suspicion that they were indoctrinating the American public with socialist ideas through the movies.
In the 1980s, Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore (D–Tenn.), started a campaign that forced record labels to put warning stickers on albums with “explicit lyrics” (New York Times, 1/4/88).
They Must Be Brainwashed
The current rhetoric against TikTok is not only a hypocritical attack on free speech, it’s an insinuation that the only reason people could be critical of Israel is manipulation by a foreign government. There’s no way people from all walks of life could simply be horrified by what’s happening in Gaza; those devilish Chinese Communists must be warping their minds.
In fact, The Washington Post (11/13/23) found that TikTok was not even unique among social networks for the gap between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel support in public posts. It said:
But Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s U.S.-based rivals, show a remarkably similar gap, their data show. On Facebook, the #freepalestine hashtag is found on more than 11 million posts—39 times more than those with #standwithisrael. On Instagram, the pro-Palestinian hashtag is found on 6 million posts, 26 times more than the pro-Israel hashtag.
Any move by elected officials to ban TikTok should be taken seriously; it’s not just about the app’s videos about terrible first dates and secret menu items. Free speech is a principle. When so-called defenders of free speech advocate censorship because they find certain political ideas too dangerous, be very worried.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'I Don't Like Censorship': Omar Slams Proposed TikTok Ban as Hawley Aims to Fast-Track Passage
"There are very legitimate concerns about privacy and the harvesting of private user data on social media platforms, but this proposal doesn't address those," said the Minnesota Democrat.
Mar 29, 2023
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday joined the ranks of progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups voicing opposition to proposals to ban TikTok as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley plans to force a vote on his bill sometime this week.
"I am opposed to efforts by some Republicans and Democrats to unilaterally ban an entire social media platform," Omar (Minn.) said in a statement.
"First of all, I don't like censorship," said Omar. "There are very legitimate concerns about privacy and the harvesting of private user data on social media platforms, but this proposal doesn't address those. Instead, it singles out one platform—TikTok—and bans it outright."
Amid a rise in what Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) has called "xenophobic anti-China rhetoric," U.S. lawmakers have introduced three pieces of legislation that would crack down on TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
Rep. Michael McCaul's (R-Texas) DATA Act, which passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year, would require the White House to sanction companies that are "subject to the jurisdiction" of China and "believed to have facilitated" the transfer of sensitive personal data.
The RESTRICT Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.), would authorize the U.S. Commerce Department to "review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries," which could trigger a TikTok ban or sale.
Hawley's (Mo.) No TikTok on United States Devices Act, meanwhile, seeks to outlaw TikTok use nationwide.
The far-right lawmaker "plans to seek unanimous consent on the floor this week" to pass his bill, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday. Hawley said that "this is the moment to act" after last week's "unbelievable" hearing, during which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was accosted by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
According to the outlet, Warner and Thune may put forth their competing bill, in which case there's a chance of neither passing the Senate before the Easter recess.
"We should create actual standards and regulations around data harvesting and privacy violations across social media companies—like many countries around the world have already done—not ban particular platforms we don't like."
"Aside from raising legitimate First Amendment concerns, this is bad policy," Omar said Tuesday. "We should create actual standards and regulations around data harvesting and privacy violations across social media companies—like many countries around the world have already done—not ban particular platforms we don't like."
With this line of criticism, Omar echoed Bowman and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose inaugural TikTok video on Saturday endorsed arguments made last month by defenders of digital rights and civil liberties.
Fight for the Future director Evan Greer, for instance, said in February that if members of Congress truly want to protect U.S. residents from the surveillance capitalist business model also embraced by domestic Big Tech firms, "they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone."
For her part, Omar stressed that "as a frequent target of disinformation campaigns, I am sympathetic to... concerns that TikTok could be used for propaganda and hate speech."
"But again, this problem is not unique to TikTok," the lawmaker continued. "Twitter, Instagram, and famously, Facebook have all been used by foreign adversaries for disinformation campaigns targeting U.S. citizens. Our regulations should address these broad issues instead of singling out one platform."
"Lastly, there are legitimate concerns about the Chinese government—including their brutal repression of the Uyghur people and their suppression of basic rights of freedom of expression in their country," said Omar. "But banning one social media company based in China will not solve those problems."
"The American model rests on our protection of those freedoms—the ability to speak publicly against the government, or if you choose, to share a 10-second video cooking your favorite meal," she added. "That is the beauty of our democracy and our constitution. That is what sets us apart from authoritarian regimes like China. And that is the example we should set for the world."
Keep ReadingShow Less
In First TikTok, AOC Says Solution Is Not Ban But Strong Privacy Laws
"Our first priority should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent," the Democrat argues.
Mar 26, 2023
Amid a national debate over whether Congress should ban TikTok, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday posted her first video on the social media platform to make the case for shifting the focus to broad privacy protections for Americans.
The New York Democrat's move follows TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee as well as rights content creators, privacy advocates, and other progressive lawmakers rallying against a company-specific ban on Capitol Hill earlier this week.
Supporters of banning TikTok—which experts say would benefit its Big Tech competitors, Google, Meta, and Snap—claim to be concerned that ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform, could share data with the Chinese government.
Meanwhile, digital rights advocates such as Fight for the Future director Evan Greer have argued that if really policymakers want to protect Americans from the surveillance capitalist business model also embraced by U.S. tech giants, "they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone."
Ocasio-Cortez embraced that argument, saying in her inaugural video: "Do I believe TikTok should be banned? No."
"I think it's important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be," Ocasio-Cortez says. "The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders, and this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it."
Advocates of banning TikTok "say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app," she explains. "However, that doesn't really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don't know about without really any significant regulation whatsoever."
"In fact, the United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books," the congresswoman stresses, pointing to the European Union's legislation as an example. "So to me, the solution here is not to ban an individual company, but to actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no."
"Usually when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing," she notes, adding that no such event has happened. "So why would we be proposing a ban regarding such a significant issue without being clued in on this at all? It just doesn't feel right to me."
The "Squad" member further argues that "we are a government by the people and for the people—and if we want to make a decision as significant as banning TikTok," any information that could justify such a policy "should be shared with the public."
"Our first priority," Ocasio-Cortez concludes, "should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent."
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy