The plan I’d aim for would be media regulation, not consumer regulation.
The right of a “free press” implies that the people who are operating the press are free from tyrannical governments and applying their conscience to their public contribution to the marketplace of ideas.
However, Jack Ma was missing and maybe-dead for a long time, and the people running TikTok are under the same unelected authoritarian genocidal government that Jack Ma was under.
The only way such business leaders can resist pressures to comply with Xi’s whims are for a short period of time, up until they are tortured or murdered or have their company stolen from them or whatever, and somehow replaced with anyone more compliant.
I’m not saying the oligarchs in this case are morally bad, just that their moral goodness could not possibly be expressed if it was vetoed by their structurally tyrannical ruler.
Indeed, my respect and care for Jack Ma, as a person, grew when I found out he was handled so brutally by his own leaders. The people who run ByteDance surely know that similar things can happen to them.
So I’d say that there are probably numbers, F, M, W, where it would be good to assess fines of $F per day to any media companies that implement recommendation engines that with more than M% market penetration in the US, who are more than W% owned by (or have anyone in their C-suite or board of directors) who is living without rights or elected leaders.
It is pretty simple: in the free world, the companies that criticallyrely on freedom to function should be owned and operated by free people.
Wouldn’t simply banning TikTok constitute a bill of attainder?
The plan I’d aim for would be media regulation, not consumer regulation.
The right of a “free press” implies that the people who are operating the press are free from tyrannical governments and applying their conscience to their public contribution to the marketplace of ideas.
However, Jack Ma was missing and maybe-dead for a long time, and the people running TikTok are under the same unelected authoritarian genocidal government that Jack Ma was under.
The only way such business leaders can resist pressures to comply with Xi’s whims are for a short period of time, up until they are tortured or murdered or have their company stolen from them or whatever, and somehow replaced with anyone more compliant.
I’m not saying the oligarchs in this case are morally bad, just that their moral goodness could not possibly be expressed if it was vetoed by their structurally tyrannical ruler.
Indeed, my respect and care for Jack Ma, as a person, grew when I found out he was handled so brutally by his own leaders. The people who run ByteDance surely know that similar things can happen to them.
So I’d say that there are probably numbers, F, M, W, where it would be good to assess fines of $F per day to any media companies that implement recommendation engines that with more than M% market penetration in the US, who are more than W% owned by (or have anyone in their C-suite or board of directors) who is living without rights or elected leaders.
It is pretty simple: in the free world, the companies that critically rely on freedom to function should be owned and operated by free people.