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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Constitutional law professor/commentator Steve Vladeck updated us on the "dispensation" of the "TikTok Ban," in light of new FOIA releases, this morning:

I wrote back in January about how the TikTok executive order President Trump signed on his first day of office committed whoever the Attorney General would be to take that first position about the meaning of the statute (which should’ve been reason enough for any principled lawyer to refuse nomination to the office, and for the Senate to refuse to confirm any nominee). But it’s the second claim—that the President, through the Attorney General, has a dispensing power—that is even more extreme; that is not even required by the executive order; and that, if it becomes a precedent, would turn the separation of powers (if not the rule of law itself) entirely on its head.

...

Late last week, in response to FOIA requests, 21 of those letters were made public. The letters are worth reading in their entirety (in some cases, multiple letters to the same company sent at different times were included). But to summarize the highlights, across those letters, the Attorney General of the United States memorialized some variation of the following three conclusions:

  • Companies that continue to support the TikTok app are not, in fact, violating the TikTok statute;
  • The TikTok statute is “properly read” to not “infringe upon . . . core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers”; and
  • The Department of Justice is “irrevocably relinquishing any claims the United States might have had” against the recipients of the letters for both previous and ongoing violations of the act.

Each of these three arguments is ludicrous. The first argument is inconsistent with the literal text of the statute—which is not exactly ambiguous about what it prohibits. Unless TikTok’s Chinese owners divested by January 19 (and they didn’t), U.S. companies are barred from:

Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.

Of course, “providing services” to distribute, maintain, or update the TikTok app is … literally what these companies are doing. Thus, there is no plausible argument that these companies are not violating the TikTok statute; they are continuing to do exactly what it bars.

See, also, Alan Rozenshtein in Lawfare.

Should the Senate have refused to confirm any nominee who committed to using "dispensation?" What is the appropriate response to this kind of corruption?

I can't speak to the legal issues, but at this stage I have no problems with someone banning TikTok because of the actual real-world harm it is doing.

Seemingly some idiot "influencers" on the app got people to drink borax as a health cure.

Need I say this is not a good idea at all?

Now, the fools may be confusing borax and boron, not helped by the fact that a salt of borax, sodium borate, is sometimes touted as "it contains boron, your body needs boron, this is fine!"

It is not fine.

Now, your opinion may differ on whether it it a public duty to protect fools from their folly, but I think that we should have some discipline over a platform encouraging the public to poison themselves, and if it takes banning TikTok to make them kick the "influencers" off the platform, well gosh we'll just have to suffer on without a stupid social media platform (until a competitor leaps in to fill the gap).

Seemingly some idiot "influencers" on the app got people to drink borax as a health cure.

Should we ban 4chan too than? They used to do this shit all the time.

Also, why do you think dangerous trolling is a Tiktok specific problem? It strikes me as a "humans on the internet" problem.

Oh, were I Dictator of Earth, I'd happily go "ban 'em all, the stupidity level is too high".

Based

4chan is already controlled by the American Intelligence Community, that's the only meaningful difference.

Dumb influencers aren't unique to TikTok. Years ago people were eating Tide Pods and posting the videos to YouTube or Facebook, and influencers have been shot while messing with strangers for "prank" videos. All of these platforms moderate content like this, but it's a cat and mouse game with users who want to evade the filters. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are copycat services offering the same short clip style of content, with the same issues.

It's a bit hard to take the TikTok moral panic seriously when the main driving force for the ban was US tech companies mad that they were being disrupted (or looking to buy the distressed asset for a discount), and it only took off thanks to AIPAC and the ADL getting upset that TikTok refused to aggressively moderate pro-Palestine content. The content can be dumb, but I don't think a sufficient case has been made for banning the service on national security grounds.

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