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Today’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a provision slipped into a humanitarian aid package in the dead of night in the U.S. Senate, will force the wildly popular social media application to shut down or sell by the end of this coming weekend.
This decision, to me, was surprisingly unanimous.
All nine of the justices — probably none with first-hand experience of running a social media account on a day-to-day basis — may have opened a somewhat troubling Pandora’s box of regulation when it comes to speech.
You see, TikTok is not just an app; it is a media company. Its content is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment, no matter who owns the media.
What, for example, could now prevent any government agency from forcing the divestiture of any media company, especially those with foreign ownership or influence?
The somewhat ham-handed attempts of governments to get some semblance of control of social media companies has led to grandstanding by government officials in the name of “protecting kids,” or “protecting national security.”
Well, here’s the thing: speech has a way of finding freedom. You have seen this over and over again in the Internet era of communications, where revolutions and freedom-fighters have taken to social media for unvarnished news and information without government oversight or control.
Except, as it turns out, in the United States.
Remember the situation a few years ago, when the U.S. government put pressure on Apple to build a “backdoor” into iPhones, citing a situation where a child had been abducted, and the police needed access to the child’s cell phone?
It feels very much like those times when American journalists have been held in jail — In America, no less — for failure to reveal their sources.
Makes you wonder which social media company is next in terms of scrutiny.