#344: TikTok and the First Amendment

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many legislators and policymakers want to ban TikTok from the United States. They claim that the wildly popular social media platform endangers American national security. Although the critics are making a lot of noise, their argument for a ban is surprisingly shaky. What concrete threat does TikTok pose? What First Amendment obstacles stand in the way of a ban? TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold and Ari Cohn discuss.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On our last show, I said, and I quote,
0:17.0	On a different episode, let's have a fuller First Amendment conversation about government attempts to ban TikTok.
0:26.8	Ladies and gentlemen, that episode is this episode.
0:32.4	TikTok is, of course, the immensely popular short form social media platform.
0:38.3	It's a great place to watch utterly pointless but amazingly creative videos.
0:44.3	They're made as best as I can tell, mostly by people who don't have kids to look after.
0:50.3	Time lapses of graffiti art being made, people pranking their friends, removing the mattresses
0:57.1	when they're not home and such. The teens playing The Floor is Lava at CVS is always good for a laugh.
1:06.3	It's TikTok, frivolous fun, right?
1:09.8	Wrong. You can't see me, but I'm making my super serious face.
1:16.9	My Sam the Eagle face. My Brendan Carr face. Ooh, FCC burn. Okay, I'm already showing my cards here a bit right out of the gate.
1:30.5	But really, what is the actual concrete threat posed by TikTok? And what are the legal grounds for
1:38.6	banning it? The legal grounds, mind you, sufficient to get around the First Amendment.
1:45.9	I feel just fine about my anti-Chinese Communist Party bona fides.
1:52.1	I literally just published a substack post titled The CCPR The Baddies.
1:58.7	I said that the Chinese Communist Party
2:00.9	is a clack of tyrants,
2:03.1	and they are.
2:05.5	And yet,
2:06.8	I have to tell you,
2:08.8	speaking as American,
2:11.2	I just don't see
	...

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