Congress' War on TikTok: How Can They Ban It?

With the #RESTRICTAct, #Congress wants to continue #Trump's war on #Tiktok, banning the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn't clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially without a national firewall:https://t.co/mnsEwddcqA 1/ pic.twitter.com/qdm3n4osK6

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8srvly, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://t.co/blbeq756nE 2/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

My guess is that they're thinking of ordering the #mobile #duopoly of @Google and @Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. 3/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

That's how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban #VPNs and other #privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:https://t.co/pu0pWg8F0j 4/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

That's the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use - as Google and Apple have done. 5/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III. 6/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

The same goes for #CommercialSurveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every tech user alive, you don't get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to participate in a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project. 7/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance #PublicPrivatePartnership is a vicious cycle. 8/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:https://t.co/5etRrFZDCb 9/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. 10/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the #NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at *least* as bad for privacy as Tiktok is - yes, even Apple. 11/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Sure, Apple lets its users block #Facebook spying with a single tap - but even if you opt out of "tracking," Apple still secretly gathers *exactly* the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:https://t.co/7aSnAYn5ZO 12/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google. 13/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

That would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:https://t.co/pKpQlYXn2K

Tech's surveillance addiction means that Tiktok's own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. 14/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

The company has proposed to put itself under @Oracle's supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, *Oracle*, the company that built the #GreatFirewallOfChina 1.0:https://t.co/kVZGam3krm 15/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

We should not trust Tiktok anymore than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before: https://t.co/m0XUz9XNe4 16/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless - it can still send the vectors and models it *creates* with that data to China. 17/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

These are far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions. 18/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool's errand. 19/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Instead, we should *ban companies from spying on us*, whether they are Chinese or American. 20/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their "executives"), and they cannot self-regulate. 21/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:https://t.co/lGtTiI4dP3 22/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn't the delightful videos or the fact that it's teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. 23/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Just like the problem with Facebook isn't that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn't that it operates a search engine. 24/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can't be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, "Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence." 25/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

But it's nonsense. Google ran for *years* without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to #Myspace and promised *never* to spy on us:https://t.co/HqZHI6kwCh 26/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

The #inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations *must* violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated #MrGotcha nonsense: "Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent":https://t.co/SetKzwhSGt 27/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American #BigTech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, #enshittified oligarchy that US companies made. 28/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a #PrivateRightOfAction. 29/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Then people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:https://t.co/xQlE9rG4KU 30/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the *defenders* of our privacy - at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary. 31/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

*And* so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech's ecosystem circulating. 32/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a *benefit* of monopoly - not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:https://t.co/Ma2FE2eohW 33/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. @AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to *all* companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:https://t.co/it4bLTcP9j 34/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

You know who agrees with AOC? #RandPaul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his #GOP caucusmates that banning an app that millions of young voters love is *bad politics*. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul understands it:https://t.co/1f1ubka5ym 35/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a "national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation." The #Democrats should listen to him, because the #GOP won't. 36/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the @USChamber and the rest of the business lobby. They are *never* going to back a policy that's as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law. 37/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as "the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies." 38/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

While the GOP positions itself as "the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by #MarkZuckerberg, #SundarPinchai and #TimCook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok." 39/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

That's not just good electoral politics - it's good policy. Young voters aren't going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be *pissed as hell* at whoever takes away their Tiktok. 40/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

And if you *do* care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; China has plenty of dollars to spend in America's freewheeling, unregulated data markets - as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other national adversary of the US. 41/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of #VPNs to circumvent its provisions. 42/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023

America doesn't need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying - it needs a privacy law. 43/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 30, 2023