Was watching Nik Reikeda stream tonight, and he was discussing the Montana law that bans download of the tiktok app.
Nik thinks the law violates 1st Amendment free speech. I have several bones to pick with him:
-
Banning the app DOES NOT BAN ACCESS, either for watching or posting videos. You can upload a video via browser through tiktok.com. All the coverage I have read about this is completely glossing over this point, that the app is superfluous to using the service. It is a convenience, nothing more.
-
App stores have banned social media apps before, Gab was kicked off both Apple and Google in 2018. How would this be any different?
And also, it was bullshit for the app stores to ban them, but you could still install them on android via side loading.
Gab went a different route by operating like an app with only a shortcut link. It's kinda weird, actually. I don't access it that way, though, since I don't use my phone for accessing internet services to begin with.
None of which alters any of the other points that Nick made.
-Montana doesn't have the authority to pursue this as a trade issue or as a foreign espionage issue, because those are both constitutionally reserved Federal powers.
-The whole right-wing statist crusade against Tik Tok is absolutely a pretext for government restriction of other social media, and will absolutely be used as a stepping stone towards banning access to other social media apps and companies that one party or another doesn't like.
-The obsession with preventing China from gaining access to Americans' user data and personal information is extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons. #1: they already have it. #2: that is nowhere near as serious a concern as the fact that the US government is already compiling all of that data about its citizens and using it to monitor and politically persecute US citizens.
-The LGBT and Communist propaganda being pushed onto kids by TikTok is no more extreme or pervasive than the same propaganda being pushed onto kids by American social media companies.
Because that wasn't government legislation: it was at least tacitly a business decision made by private corporations. Yes, we all know that the tech giants were banning Gab and Parler at the behest of government intelligence agencies, and that is almost certainly unconstitutional, but it's still different from a legislature passing legislation that forces private companies to restrict access to a certain product, even if it's just the app. Nick is likely correct in his assessment that the lawsuit will be successful and this law will be overturned.
This whole thing is evidence of how the right can be 'led to water' by the left using their moral outrage, it's a huge weakness of the right. It's completely understandable to dislike Tiktok and it's content, same thing with porn but that is only a consequence not the source of the problem.
If you want the source, look at all this fatherless behaviour caused by decades of the break up of the nuclear family as if there was 1 responsible parent in all these thots lives they'd be slapped on the back of the head and told to put some clothes on. Banning Tiktok does nothing in the grand scale of things, just makes the right feel like they did something why the left rub their hands with glee that they now have the precedent to apply restrictions to other social media sites.
It's less to do with moral courage and more to do with being too trusting of the GOP, in general.
Just forcing app stores to not carry it will do the majority of the work. Trust me, most teenagers would be surprised to learn tiktok dot com was connected to TikTok.