The Court, including the three "liberals," all upheld the law demanding that TikTok's owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, sell TikTok by January 19, 2025, or it will be forcibly shut down. Fines for violations are $5,000 per use. This forces Apple and others to deactivate the TikTok apps.
As usually happens when there is a conflict between power and rights, rights loses. There are numerous major legal cases in U.S. history where this is true. Understand, they don't say "power," they say "National Security." That is a euphemism, code words, for U.S. national power. That's what happened in this case, where the government invoked "national security" and all nine Supremos ruled that power trumps rights. And never mind what it says in the U.S. Constitution, the basic law of the nation, specifically the First Amendment, that "guarantees" freedom of speech. A phony guarantee with no actual assurance. For example: during World War I, the regime of Woodrow Wilson got Congress to outlaw opposition to U.S. entry and participation in the war. Some dissidents who threw anti-war leaflets off a roof were criminally convicted and imprisoned. The Supreme Court ruled that the vaunted First Amendment didn't protect them from being incarcerated. There are many other examples of how all the blather about American "freedom" and "liberty" and "free speech" is so much gaslighting propaganda. Basically the rulers tolerate some speech but certainly not all, and when the chips are down during times of "national emergency" (like the U.S. wants to fight a war somewhere, or is conducting a domestic political purge) the repression increases.
The Democrats are having second thoughts about pissing off 170 million people in this country who use TikTok. Many people make a livelihood from their TikTok videos. The Democrats' leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer, is now saying let's give ByteDance another 90 days to seek a buyer for TikTok. And incoming U.S. emperor- ahem, "president"- Donald Trump has reversed his earlier hatred of TikTok and now claims the power to unblock the ban. Except that the day before he becomes president on January 20, TikTok legally is taken offline in the U.S. And Trump can't order U.S. hosting companies to ignore the law and put it back on. Even if his Justice Department doesn't prosecute them, within the statute of limitations (seven years for most Federal crimes) a future regime could.
Surprisingly, I haven't heard of any
organized movement among these 170 million people whose rights were
violated, whose freedom was raped, developing. This is an example of the
extremely low level of political consciousness in the U.S. population
generally, notwithstanding the minorities that get agitated over, say, a
genocide in Gaza, or a video of a black man being slowly executed on
the street by Minneapolis police.
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DROPSITENEWS has these details about the TikTok ban:
"Congress moved to prohibit Americans from visiting the number one site in the world, TikTok. But the “TikTok ban” bill goes much further than prohibiting Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, from controlling the app in the United States. The measure gives new power to the president to determine which social media platforms from around the world are permitted in the United States.
"Signed into law in April
of last year and upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17, H.R.7521,
not only prohibits TikTok starting January 19, 2025—it gives the president authority to prohibit any foreign-owned social networking app through a simple two-step process. [My emphasis.
Part of the process is the president submitting a CLASSIFIED annex to
Congress of what he wants banned- that is, a SECRET list. The excuse for
this repression is "threat to U.S. national security," the usual magic
wand phrase that unlocks magical powers to brush aside any and all
rights.]
[dropsitenews describes how giant U.S. tech corps ganged up on TikTok to eliminate a successful rival. The tech giants always either buy out or use market muscle to kill smaller successful companies that come up with new digital services and platforms. Forcing a sale or closure of TikTok accomplishes that anti-competitive, monopolistic goal using state power.]
"Ahead of the ban, Tik Tok’s U.S. based competitors actively lobbied for the bill. The strategy for large tech firms and social media companies has been to rid the market of competition, known as “catch and kill.” Facebook’s parent company, Meta, paid a consulting firm, Targeted Victory, to run a nationwide media campaign bashing Tik Tok. According to internal emails, leaked to the Washington Post in March of 2022, the firm was hired to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using.”
"Tik Tok was only the bill’s first target. H.R.7521, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” specifically determines “ByteDance, Ltd.; TikTok” is a “foreign adversary controlled application.” In accordance with the bill, it will be unlawful to “distribute, maintain, or update” Tik Tok in the United States 180 days after the bill’s enactment. Unless, of course, TikTok is under new ownership and determined by “the President… through an interagency process” to no longer be controlled by a foreign adversary.
"The bill is sweeping, prohibiting any “covered company" that is “controlled by a foreign adversary” and is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”
"H.R.7521 places a shocking amount of power in the hands of the President, allowing them full power to determine which foreign-owned social media platforms live or die in the United States. The hyperfocus on Tik Tok may be a red herring, distracting from the sweeping impact of the measure: Ushering in a new era where the commander-in-chief decides who Americans are able to connect with around the world—potentially sowing deeper divisions among the U.S. and its foreign adversaries."
In other words, a state of quasi-war.
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