TikTok sues the US government over ban

Every negative thing about Tiktok is also true about Instagram and Twitter.

TikTok is solely responsible for that AI voice. Instagram and Twitter have never done anything that compares to the pain and suffering that has caused to humanity.
- M A R C U S P U M P K I N
I'm basically indifferent to Instagram (IDK what it's about) and I've hated Twitter since I first learned about its high concept. Twitter makes people stupid.
Except the most relevant part: it is owned by a hostile foreign government.
- To be fair, so is League of Legends and every product made by Tencent and their subsidiaries. If they're going to go ahead with a ban, they should at least keep it consistent.
Except the part about the authoritarian regime, the US has many problems but it's still a democracy.
Edit: I'm glad you downvote me because you never had to learn what living in a dictatorship is like, I didn't, but my parents generation still did and I can tell you it looks nothing like the US of today. Women were only allowed to be housewives, groups of more than 2 people couldn't talk openly in the street because that can lead to dangerous ideas spreading out, you would have to be careful what you said even at home because your neighbour could be listening to sell you out, all pieces of art and media would go through an government office to get censored, and so on, so yes, I stand with what I said, the US is a free democratic country even if you have been spoiled enough to think it is not.
- It's not a democracy to me.
- the US has many problems but it's still a democracy.
  LMAO
- Hey I was born in a country with a military dictatorship and my parents grew up under it.
  That's exactly why I believe in freedom and liberty. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association. We need to uphold these principles so that the US doesn't slowly slip into authoritarianism like most democracies tend to do over the long term.
  That's exactly why I oppose this TikTok ban with every fiber of my being. If a citizen wants to communicate on a Chinese platform, he has every right to do so under our laws. He can make the executive decision for himself about the potential risks or benefits.
  That's what it means to live in a free society. You are advocating for authoritarianism while you rail against authoritarianism. Reminds me of 1984. War is peace, right?
- Not everything that's not a dictatorship is a democracy. You're using a strawman to argue your point.
  A democracy stops when there is a severe imbalance in influence on legislation between voters and lobbyists / corporations / or voters depending on income / colour of skin.
  There's also a quasi oligarchy with freedom of speech, that's about where western Europe is at. In the US, by now, a large part of the population has been deprived of basic human rights, as shown in unpunished police brutality and murders, and vigilante killings of people for their beliefs, opinions or identity.
  Neither still qualifies for democracy. We would have to unite about two thirds of the voters behind a new party to even hope to change anything that matters (hello climate change), and that's assuming that a hypothetical party that would actually act in the interest of restoring democratic mechanisms would be persecuted or otherwise hindered by authorities.
- the US has many problems but it’s still a democracy
  Given the choice between hot shit and cold shit still ends with you being covered in shit. Heads or tails between two very similar parties hardly counts as a true democracy.
- And What does that have to do with anything? We aren't dealing with China, we're dealing with a corporation.
- Doesn't really matter unless you live under it. Instagram and Twitter or more dangerous to U.S. citizens.
- Which country is this?
- You got downvoted so much that I had to check if we were on ml or hexbear. Those CCP shills really operating in broad daylight on this post, they must have gotten board of the echo rooms filled with bots on their home instance.

TikTok blocks all access from Hong Kong. Can I sue them?

Not as a foreign national.
- And not as a Hong-Konger, if you don't want your family on a blacklist.
Wait, I'm in HK right now for business and can open it just fine from my hotel wifi. The website that is, I don't care about the platform and wouldn't use the app.
I could play videos just fine without login though. Anything I'm missing?
- Really? It just redirects me to https://www.tiktok.com/hk/notfound

Good. The ban is censorship dressed up as national security.

TikTok is state sponsored spyware dressed up as fUnNy ViDeOs
- And Facebook isn’t?
- So is Instagram
- Can I ban NSA from spying on me? I'm not even on fReEeDoOoOoM land, I should be entitled to some amount of privacy
- And if someone chooses to watch that, that's their business. Not nanny government's. Not saying I do. But none of us have any business telling someone else what they can and cannot watch. That's part of living in a supposedly "free" country. We aren't China. You want a "great firewall", then move there.
  In our zeal to shun everything China-related, we must not become them.
- Which is any different than YouTube, Lemmy or anything else?
  I think people should have a right to shoot themselves in the foot if they choose.
I thought the worst censorship is on facebook... then i started using tiktok...

What would give them standing? They'd have to be an entity protected by the constitution to claim that protection was harmed. Is it this (Wikipedia)?

TikTok Ltd was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in both Singapore and Los Angeles. source

I guess I've never thought about what makes an entity have rights here. Buckingham Palace couldn't just open shop here and start suing our government, right?

The case is essentially "hey you kinda passed a bill that's against your own constitution? You're kinda supposed to follow that..."
- Does the US constitution apply for rights of businesses, or is it just people?
  Not being snarky I actually don't know
The constitution applies to the government, not the American (or other) people. “Government shall pass no law…”
List of companies incorporated in the Cayman Islands: https://capedge.com/company/by/incState/E9/active/true?sort=latestQuote.marketCap
Mostly obscure to me, but I looked up GlobalFoundries. Originally divested from AMD, bought IBM's chip business, got a contract from US Department of Defense in 2023 for manufacturing military chips
I imagine you wouldn't object to GlobalFoundries suing the US government
Of course, corporations are people and this is bigotry. Check mate.
We decided a while ago that the Constitution protects everyone and every thing in the US because the loophole of declaring people and companies to not be protected was too dystopian even for conservatives at the time.
Something important to note here is that there are various exceptions to freedom of speech protections from various time periods, one such exception is Incitement – If a person has the intention of inciting the violations of laws that is imminent and likely, while directing this incitement at a person or groups of persons, their speech will not be protected under the First Amendment. This test was created by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
This is relevant because alongside the TikTok forced sale they also passed a law against sending sensitive data including personal details and photographs to adversarial nations including Russia, China, Iran, etc. That means that Incitement could be used to describe TikTok operating in any capacity without completely centralizing to the USA, and therefor they would have no protections by the first amendment.

grabs popcorn

At this point, I'd like to ask: If a foreign company threatens democracy in a country, is it legal for the executive to ban business with that company?

No? Then that doesn't make sense. It's a FOREIGN company, the government should have the right to do whatever it needs to protect its citizens in that regard.

This is the real question. Is there a loophole that allows foreign governments to freely exercise mass surveillance and psyops if they allow US citizens to post on a blackboard outside their offices?
Especially since it was a bonified Military Operation.
If tiktok were a serious threat, the executive branch would have already banned it by now via an executive order.
That's not what happend, instead a whole bill went through congress and got passed with the explanation being "foreign influence" as if American social media platforms don't already do the same thing
This is more about removing foreign competition and not about saving democracy or ensuring security.
DoD already banned it 4 years ago for military because of the actual security threat of data collection.
- TikTok pushed a notifications to all US users with the phone numbers of their local congressmen to oppose the bill. So many calls came in that the phone lines were jammed.
  Let me distill that for you: China attempted to directly influence legislation with a mass propaganda campaign targeted at its US user base.
  Please explain to me why that isn't a threat and why the US should allow hostile foreign powers to directly influence internal politics?
The government certainly does have the right to protect citizens and make whatever laws are necessary. In this case, the government can do so by amending the constitution. Until then, the 1st Amendment applies to all citizens, non-citizens, and business entities operating in the United States.
- This is just blatantly false, if an organization is committing crimes or doing something the government dislikes then the government will sanction it, like it has done with almost every Russian Oligarch's business, or front businesses for terrorist groups.
  I'm pretty sure the whole point of banning TikTok is that the government is alleging that TikTok has engaged/can be forced to engage in abusive or illegal practices.
- There are already exceptions to the First Amendment that did not require updating the US Constitution, such as the Supreme Court ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio 1969 which excludes Incitement as protected speech, Incitement being the advocacy of or in any way leading to the breaking of US laws which *checks notes includes sending personal data to adversarial nations including China and therefor TikTok's operations are not protected.

Why can't a country choose which services it wants to prohibit? Seems strange, it isn't an American company.
I don't really care, just wondering.
- In the U.S., laws that disadvantage specific entities are generally considered to not be following the "equal protection" part of the (amended) constitution.
  Countries without (their own) laws prohibiting it can (and do) prohibit specific services.
  Member states of the WTO (like the U.S.) have agreed to allow themselves to be sued for lost profits based on any (new) laws they pass.
  But, I'm no expert -- this is just the view from my (potentially misinformed) corner of the world.

When does a company care about the constitution? When it’s profits are threatened and the constitution suits their argument.

Down with vertical videos, down with short form content!

PS, China already bought all your personal data from Facebook.

I do not care.

Well, you do care enough to feel the need to let everyone know your opinion on the subject.
- Oh shut the fuck up. Can we please not devolve every online argument into circular "well you cared enough to post this" bullshit? It's exhausting.

The ironic thing is that if the US government wanted people to stop using it because of the PRC, they should have just leaked some fake Snowden style documents saying that the NSA was using it. Everyone would drop it like a hot potato then.

No they wouldn't. "I don't care, I've got nothing to hide"

Not a fan of tiktok content but I do see that it was banned obviously for censorship. A good move.

M A R C U S P U M P K I N