Tag Archives: free speech

ByteDance and TikTok

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Recall that TikTok, a social medium heavily favored by our children, is wholly owned by ByteDance. Recall further, that ByteDance is domiciled inside the Peoples Republic of China. Finally, recall that the PRC’s 2017 national security law requires every PRC-domiciled company to collect and deliver to that nation’s intelligence community any information that community requests. A bonus memory: TikTok’s executive team has been at pains to insist that, in the United States, they operate independently of all of that.

Against that backdrop, there’s this:

Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the US from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.

That’s not independence. Nor does it matter what top jobs, in particular, ByteDance’s transferred executives assume in TikTok. They work for ByteDance, which operates at the behest of the PRC government. Their presence at the top of TikTok only tightens that control.

Bottom line: it doesn’t matter how much gussying up ByteDance or TikTok executives do in their attempts to deny Peoples Republic of China control of TikTok; the PRC’s intelligence community can command TikTok to obtain and deliver any information regarding TikTok’s users that the intel community wants.

It’s past time the Federal government bans TikTok from any and all operations inside the US. Standing in the way of that are too many Congressmen and Senators, of both parties, who have taken “donations” from folks like Jeff Yass, who through his Susquehanna International Group owns a big stake in ByteDance, [and he] has also worked to fend off a US ban through organizations like Club for Growth. Among those…donees…are

  • Senator Rand Paul (R, KY), who received through a Paul-supporting PAC, $3 million
  • Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY), who has received $32,200 directly from Yass, his wife, and via a Massie-supporting PAC
  • Other [carefully unnamed] Republicans in Congress, including at least five others besides Paul and Massie, who received financial support from Club for Growth and have objected to legislation targeting TikTok.

Yass has rationalized his antipathy to banning TikTok with this:

TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.

Aside from moving to protect his investment in the PRC-controlled ByteDance, it appears that part of everything I believe includes the right of the Peoples Republic of China to spy on our children. Banning TikTok has nothing to do with interfering with free speech (or innovation, come to that). Banning TikTok would ban a tool used by the PRC against our children and our national security, to the extent it’s used by government officials at any level of our hierarchy or by business executives anywhere. Content, speech, all of that, could and would continue apace, completely unhindered, on any of the plethora of other social medium platforms.

Ban TikTok. No further delays.

A Bogus Beef

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Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.

The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.

This is, to use the legalese technical term, a crock. It’s also, to use a legal technical term, a frivolous suit.

Banning TikTok in no way inhibits what these academics say or collaborate over, nor does it in any way impede those academics’ speech or collaboration; it only bans one tool, a national security risk, from being used for the speech/collaboration. There are, after all, a plethora of communication and collaboration devices available other than TikTok. To name just a few (located after 10 grueling seconds on Bing search):

  • Slack
  • Zoom
  • Miro
  • MindMeister
  • Loom
  • Asana
  • Notion
  • Microsoft Teams

There are, also, freeware tools like Hugo and Scribe.

It’s hard to believe these So Smart persons aren’t aware of these tools. Maybe they should listen more to the students in their freshman orientation courses.

It’s even harder to understand why these Precious Ones insist on leaving their personal information; their research ideas, techniques, and progresses; their speech and thought available for People’s Republic of China government personnel to freely exploit; they should be called to explain that.

Their free speech interference claim is especially pernicious, given that these august personages are of the same guild that so zealously blocks, even with violence and firings, the speech of those with whom they disagree.

Misguided

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A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction (meaning the matter must still go through the courts before anything becomes final) barring the Federal government from communicating with social-media companies with a view to influencing what those companies post or allow to be posted on their sites.

Some on the Left are objecting.

Some legal scholars have been skeptical that…courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest.

“Some legal scholars” are cynically distorting the situation. There is nothing in the judge’s ruling that bars government speech about controversial matters of public interest. The “government”—i.e., the men and women in government—remains entirely free to speak on any matters it wishes, and in any venue it wishes. The “government,” however, may not seek to tell—or even to try to influence—private enterprises what they might post or not post, or allow or not allow to be posted, on their sites.

The government has a plethora of outlets of its own: the White House, for instance, the Senate, and the House all have their own Web sites, as do each of the several Federal Departments and agencies, and every Congressman in the Congress. And many of those Congressmen hold aperiodic town halls to talk directly with their constituents—all of them should, and those meetings should occur more frequently—but that’s the Congressmen’s choice. Nothing bars any Congressman from doing any of those direct-to-constituents conversations as often as a Congressman might wish.

Furthermore, the judge noted in his injunction that

The Court finds…that a preliminary injunction here would not prohibit government speech.

And

A government entity has the right to speak for itself and is entitled to say what it wishes and express the views it wishes to express. The Free Speech Clause restricts government regulation of private speech; it does not regulate government speech.

At bottom, and especially in light of that last—and the plethora of legitimate government outlets for its own speech—the answer to speech with which government disagrees is not to bar the speech (outside of deliberate and overt incitement to riot), but to answer it with their own speech.

The judge’s preliminary injunction ruling can be read here.

Free Speech Progressive-Democrat Style

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Progressive-Democratic Party members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittees—Congressmen Frank Pallone (D, NJ), Jan Schakowsky (D, IL), Doris Matsui (D, CA), and Kathy Castor (D, FL)—are unhappy with the new free speech position of Sundar Pichai’s Google-owned YouTube. They categorically reject YouTube‘s statement that

open debate on political ideas, “even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society—especially in the midst of election season.”

They’re perfectly fine, though, with Pichai’s YouTube censoring the speech of President Joe Biden’s (D) presidential primary campaign opponent, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and leaving Biden an unanswered and unanswerable field for his own speech.

The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it seems, want to be the sole arbiters of what speech is legitimate, and what speech must be banned. These Leftist politicians think we ordinary Americans are just too grindingly stupid to understand what we hear and how to evaluate it, and so we must not be allowed the choice. We must be led by these Leftist politicians.

This is the naked censorship toward which we can look if the Progressive-Democratic Party wins in 2024.

Joe Biden and the Press

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Simon Ateba is a Cameroonian journalist representing Today News Africa in the White House Press Corps. During the daily mid-day-ish press briefings, President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre routinely clashes with him, essentially telling him to shut up and sit down when she’s not ignoring him altogether.

Then came last Monday’s live stream of the day’s presser—and a lively exchange between Ateba and Jeanne-Pierre was excised from the stream. Completely stripped out. Censored.

The deleted portion was restored only after Fox News Digital asked the press secretary’s office how that worked.  “The White House” claimed the deletion was caused by a technical glitch. Apparently, no one in Jean-Pierre’s office monitors the feed to ensure a livestream upload goes smoothly. Or at least that’s the implication from the claim, since surely any such glitch would have been corrected in real time, had anyone been paying attention.

Former President Donald Trump (R) didn’t even treat CNN‘s deliberately combative, constantly interrupting Jim Acosta so shabbily, for all that he so frequently argued with Acosta.

Again I ask: of what is Biden so terrified that he won’t even let his Press Secretary engage with a journalist like Ateba?