EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

> obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted

That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?

As someone not living the us but regularly reading news from both sides of your media landscape, I can tell you that it's not regulated what they can write or say or what's promoted. Your media is all over the place. There are differences in how far they go on the spectrum and some are definitely insane on what they publish to the level of leaving out all the important details about certain situations to push their agenda. How do you think that there is any regulation at all?

Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.

What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.

And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.

I think you misunderstand me: I'm not in favor of banning tiktok on its own. I think you're right that that misweights things, further consolidating power in the hands of those who hold the remaining platforms.

What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.

I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.

And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.

It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.

> The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.

We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...

Making things up is inherently vastly cheaper than flighting misinformation.

Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.

> The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.

I'm sorry, but that's a load of baloney on par with "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".

Second of all: it's obviously false. There are loads of examples - contemporary as well as older - where people actively peddled "incorrect information" to line their own pockets at the expense of the money/health/wellbeing of others. Having the facts does not repair the damage, nor does it prevent future harm.

But, firstly and more importantly, this framing suggests we should allow for misinformation. We absolutely shouldn't. The public debate isn't resilient to malicious actors. That's what makes misinformation so dangerous and what makes this slogan so hollow. It assumes good faith on all parties. There isn't, so stop advocating for solutions that require that.

In more detail: the public debate is meant for an actual exchange of ideas, thereby enlightening the participants. Anyone who is not interested in that, shouldn't participate. In particular, misinformation should be barred from the public debate. - and those spreading it held to account.

Whether it is knowingly claiming that lead is harmless, that smoking has no negative effects on your health, or anything vaguely political of the last dozen or so years: if you're unaware, it's not your fault yet, but you'll need to stop being ignorant. If you're aware that the information you're spreading is wrong: shame on you! You should be barred from participating in (that line of the) public debate.

I'm not arguing against incorrect information being spread, I'm arguing against the existence of platforms that are specifically designed to drip feed people information that, true or not, changes their minds about something with a high degree of predictability.

Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.

The problem is Brandolini's law - “it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than that needed to produce it”. So allowing widely disseminated bullshit effectively opens our society up to a denial-of-service attack.

I challenge the notion that they're equal. Social media at least provides vox while traditional media is completely one-way. How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero. Traditional media acts as programming first. Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.

I posted this elsewhere:

There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.

When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.

The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.

At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.

The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.

> couldn't

Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.

> Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic.

> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.

It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.

> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.

The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.

This is part of why I think there should exist a popular real-name-only network. It'd go far to prevent these types of attacks on the megaphone.

I blame the Zuck algorithmic feed ruined it all he was my favorite out of all the feudal barons too :(

There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.

When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.

The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.

At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.

Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.

In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.

You're presuming that these are communication platforms. I argue that they aren't—to the extent that they are useful for communication it's a pure coincidence, not a design choice.

Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.

Absurd. To use just one example, if the US Gov has that mandate, why is extreme gerrymandering allowed? Seems like it's common for Americans to just repeat what they've been told without actually thinking about it.

"Forcing" people to be "free".

If you want peace, you better prepare for war.

It is forbidden to forbid.

The necessary evil.

All that to say, we live in a complicated world, and beautiful ideals are only a direction to keep, never to be reached.

The state is under no obligation to allow known foreign propagandists attached to a known communist party to engage in activities well outside the protections of the first amendment.

Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.

Privacy legislation isn't going to happen because it's too late.

It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.

But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.

Privacy laws don't solve the real problem, they would only solve the fig leaf that politicians are hiding behind when it comes to tiktok.

The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.

On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.

yes, and they do. Even the US allies in Europe don't completely trust the US with their citizens data, hence the on-shore data requirements. This is despite the US is footing the bill for Ukraine and, by extension, defending Europe right now.

Why? The US is not an adversary to most. But if they did, sure, it's their country.

First, it is much easier to blame everything on a boogeyman than to invest actual effort in improving the lives of Americans and investing in their education. Tale as old as time.

Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.

There's no need to demonize people, soulless systems will do just fine. Game theory is pushing continental powers against maritime ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8

Neil Gorsuch is though and he signed on too. He even said that while he thought the government had to prove a higher standard than the opinion required, it didn’t matter to the decision because the government in his mind had met that even higher standard anyway.

signal in belief that freedom of speech has limits, and it doesn't extend to a foreign adversary hoping to decimate the USA has been my conclusion from the 9-0 decision of SCOTUS

Wait, since when is TikTok decentralised?

Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it.

When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.

inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.

Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.

I worked at EFF for twenty years, and every iteration or incarnation of EFF would have said that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to prevent Americans from using foreign web sites or software. And that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to compel tech intermediaries to help block foreign sites or software. This would have been a bog-standard EFF position for the organization's entire existence.

(I would say something even stronger than "extraordinarily difficult", but then I'd be on thinner ice.)

I agree with the EFF on a lot of stuff. I don't believe in absolute _________ without considering life is virtually never that simple.

Actually, the option to divest is to escape control by the Chinese government, not to enter control by the US government.

> if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers

I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.

Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.

Your last statement is a pretty silly generalization, and I don't think you need to bring in left/right extremes into this. For a lot of folks this is more about precedent on being able to ban anything the current establishment disagrees with, which has its own merits, even if you want to say that it's strictly being done because China controls it, which is not 100% of the reason why.

I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.

What’s next, pitting a fence around some field is also freedom-of-speech issue since some people may want to talk in that field?

What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...

On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?

Yes, that’s a good way to think about it.

What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.

I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.

There’s a simple, obvious and overwhelmingly popular solution to this problem that respects free speech and privacy. Unlike the current law, it wouldn’t blatantly violate the constitution by targeting a specific group:

Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.

I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.

Adding: commenter @schoen's above comment is making me second guess myself on this. I'm pretty torn.

The fact that only one app is being banned makes it pretty obvious that privacy concerns are orthogonal to the political shift this represents. The law was originally passed before the Gaza ceasefire, and the activism on the app relating to that issue was the specific example that was blamed on Chinese influence. The hypothesis was that teenagers would not know or care about US policy towards the conflict if a foreign communication service was not facilitating the spread of relevant information.

You can demand whatever you desire from your government. It's your country.

I feel that Europe has exactly that very right, as I support our right to exorcise control of the CCP from TikTok and/or shut it down. I completely understand why they would.

As a European, I am 100% ok with EU banning Facebook and other large advertisement funded platforms.

When GDPR was created there was a huge wave of people arguing that Facebook and other similar platforms would withdraw from EU. That did not happen, but if it had it would have been perfectly fine. Instead most American companies decided to create EU specific version of their platforms in order to comply with GDPR.

The next wave of privacy protecting regulations will likely recreate similar reactions. Those companies that want to stay in EU will comply, and those who don't will withdraw and give space to new ones. The trend of moving to national platforms/cloud providers has already started and been going on fairly strong in my country, especially from government organization and defense adjacent companies.