This week the House will hold a vote on a bipartisan bill that would prevent the social media app TikTok from appearing in app stores unless it’s able to be “fully divested” from Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance.
Following a unanimous vote on March 7, The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R.7521) advanced from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and will now receive a full vote on Wednesday at around 10 a.m. according to Reuters.
The bill was introduced on March 5 by 19 members of the House Select Committee on the CCP – including Chair Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL).
The bill also has the support of President Biden, who said “I’ll sign it” if Congress puts it on his desk.
Trojan Horse?
The rushed bill, seemingly out of nowhere – and just weeks after the Biden campaign made a TikTok account (and posted to it) on Super Bowl Sunday, has raised concerns over government overreach.
On Tuesday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted on X, “The so-called TikTok ban is a trojan horse” that would give the President the power to “ban WEB SITES,” not just apps.
“If you think this isn’t a Trojan horse and will only apply to TikTok and foreign-adversary social media companies, then contemplate why someone thought it was important to get a very specific exclusion for their internet based business written into the bill,” he added.
If you think this isn’t a Trojan horse and will only apply to TikTok and foreign-adversary social media companies, then contemplate why someone thought it was important to get a very specific exclusion for their internet based business written into the bill: pic.twitter.com/LnHsmEgtt9
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 12, 2024
A foreign adversary controlled application is defined as; a website or app that is “operated directly or indirectly”
by a “foreign adversary” by which the President and or Attorney General determines is a threat to the national security of the United States. pic.twitter.com/yWnq6Vigbw
— Patrick Webb (@RealPatrickWebb) March 13, 2024
Expanding on this was The Federalist‘s Sean Davis, who wrote in a lengthy post on X (emphasis ours):
Here’s what’s actually going on with the TikTok fight right now.
Deep State toadies are taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state.
TikTok isn’t going to be banned, because neither the CCP-run Chinese government nor the CCP-owned U.S. government wants to lose such a valuable tool for spying on Americans and poisoning the minds of their children. Instead, the corrupt U.S. intelligence bureaucracy wants control of TikTok, which is why it included the divestment mandate.
Only a handful of U.S. companies are capable of buying and managing TikTok, and they already function as appendages of the Deep State surveillance apparatus.
It’s not that the U.S. government wants to protect you from spying and data theft and manipulation. If only. No, the people behind the Russian collusion hoax, and the Kavanaugh hoax, and the natural origin COVID hoax, and the illegal warrantless spying, and the forced transing of your children—they want to be the ones spying on you and stealing your data and poisoning the minds of your children.
Now, should a spying and subversion tool used by our communist enemies to destroy us be banned? Yeah, obviously, for the same reason that we never would’ve allowed the Soviet Union to infiltrate our homes with their own radios and television sets during the Cold War. But that’s not what’s happening here.
Your government won’t even shoot down a Communist Chinese spy balloon, or prevent the Communist Chinese government from gobbling up your farmland, or stop the Communist Chinese government from stealing the products you make, dumping them into your market at below-market prices, and then driving you out of business. Heck, when the literal Chinese spy chief bought off the Biden family by funneling a million dollars to Hunter Biden, DOJ didn’t even bat an eyelash.
There’s no evidence anywhere that the regime that currently controls America has any interest in fighting off China’s attempts to cripple our country economically, militarily, or diplomatically. But suddenly they want you to believe they’re deeply concerned about TikTok.
I’m just not buying it, and neither should you.
Mea Culpa
While TikTok has been long accused of curating degenerate content to feed the minds of Western youth, this, and worse, is what all social media platforms have been doing for years.
And with regards to the ongoing chess game to decide the fate of TikTok – on one hand, the Wall Street Journal just reported that after company believed they had scored a recent victory, including the Biden campaign embracing the platform, “Behind the scenes in Washington, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Biden administration officials had been quietly planning new legislation to ban TikTok or force its sale to a non-Chinese owner.”
On the other hand, Donald Trump – who has previously pushed to ban TikTok, came out against the bill (after meeting with Billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass who holds a 15% stake in ByteDance) – leading some to suggest that the former president had “sold out.”
We also learned from Politico that former Trump Aide Kellyanne Conway has begun lobbying for TikTok on behalf of the conservative Club for Growth – of which Yass is a large financial backer – and at whose retreat Trump praised Yass as “fantastic.”
So, lots of chess going on and forces at work.
Yet, after further consideration, this Tyler got it wrong. As ZeroHedge commenter PrintCash pointed out on Monday, this is both a free speech issue and a matter of limited government vs. legislative overreach that – based on the above, appears to set the stage for widespread abuse.
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Once they start banning websites?
My phone is moving to Canada.
Ha!
You might want to go with a good VPN instead. If you look into phone companies in Canada, you’ll find we pay some of the highest mobile phone and internet rates in the world.
Canada has already started the defacto banning of websites. The government demanded Facebook and other social media companies pay millions in exchange for linking to news articles on Canadian websites. Rather than paying the goverment’s demands, Facebook and other social media sites now block links to Canadian news websites.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/world/canada/meta-facebook-news-feed-removed.html
And if the Liberal’s new Online Harms bill passes, anything a person ever posted online could be deemed hate speech by the government and the poster could subject to punishments ranging from fines up to life imprisonment. The bill even includes a thoughtcrime clause where government can lock you up for hate crimes they think you might commit. The trouble is, the government gets to define what hate means.
Ammo up hosers
HR7521 – The TikTok Ban Law (as written) is NOT About Banning TikTok, It’s About Information Control
I swear by all that I know to be righteous and accurate, the combined willpower of the UniParty in Washington DC is not targeting TikTok from the perspective of concern over data collection. Instead, the DC system -which is to say the USIC- is using the auspices of TikTok to expand the reach of government censorship and control information.
This is a domestic information space battle, using the guise of TikTok as a baseline for justification. How do we know? You only need to look at the mechanism of the law as it is written, the compliance section, and the definitions they are using to see they are not targeting data collection. [pdf of HR7521 HERE]
If TikTok data collection was the issue, the law would be structured to ban foreign data collection. That’s not what this is. This is a law written to give the Executive Branch the power to define any platform as “foreign owned” by the service provider (even if domestic) and the substance of the content contained and/or distributed.
Put all our energy into fake banning tictok.
Hilarious!
That’s exactly what I came to say: it’s about info control, as any dictatorship wants. Every action on the part of TPTB is about depop and technocracy. They certainly aren’t trying to protect us; they’re protecting their hold on power – always.
Based on the state of the art censorship TikTok did to protect the Covid bioweapon injections industry, I can assure you that whoever is calling the shots there isn’t Chinese. More like Unit 8200.
Something that not many seem to talk about is the reasoning behind this whole thing.
The uni-party is worried about a government collecting information on people in these (dis)united states. And using propaganda to “influence” them. (.gov education, anyone?)
And yet very few of them say a word about OUR government doing that, really, since it’s founding, but certainly attaining new heights since the un-patriotic act.
Any excuse to send more control to fewer people. (them)
When is this never about money? Who gets the money, who does not get the money? It’s not about the children, ever–unless it’s about how to exploit the children. Turtles–no, capitalist assholes–all the way down.
ToK was truLy eviL spyware, now once Facebook is banned worldwide, we can say that’s progress, all so called soc media is communist propaganda PSYOPS mind controL brainwashing, we never used it and neither should you, show some common sense for godssake, only 5 year old little kids post things back and forth all day, it’s ridiculous
When a bill gets that many “bipartisan” votes you know it is bad for We The People. I think it is only being passed for future use.
We (should) all know whatever a bill is about, isn’t what it’s about. The Patriot Act, Safe Harbor Banking, etc…the exact opposite of the presumed intention.
If Govt . is for it, you know you should be against it.
Just another attempt at censoring a social media platform. I’m not a user of tik tok but I could see the massive benefits to using it as means of mass communication. Plus it’s one that the US government does not control. They control X, Fuckfacebook etc..
It’s about closing down an upstart foreign competitor. Tik Tok is too successful. The arguments against it are all nonsense.
YES, any legislation is a Trojan horse lie to enslave you .
Peace, L.
Not sure what to think of this other than election year posturing. Tempest in a Tea Pot.
Jeff Yass invested $30M in Byte Dance which owns tic-tok. Jeff Yass is the richest man in PA, a R heavyweight donor, and was interviewed yesterday by Orange Jesus about a possible cabinet position. That explains Orange Jesus’ change of heart about banning it.
Jeff Yass also wears tiny hats.
Nothing has changed with Orange Jesus, for sale to the highest bidder and appoints attractive women to positions they have no business occupying. But he’s gonna fix everything, right?
Tucker is probably paid for but some of interviews are great.
https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-the-tiktok-ban/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=na&utm_campaign=20240314_march14dailybrief&utm_content=314787