by Mike Masnik at techdirt
from the ain’t-no-hypocrisy-like-congressional-hypocrisy dept
Is the US government allowed to step in to deal with foreign influence on social media or not? According to at least some members of Congress, the answer appears to be “yes, when we dislike what they’re saying, and no when we like what they’re saying.”
When the original House bill to “ban TikTok” passed, David Greene and Karen Gullo at EFF noted the odd contrast of dozens of Congressional Reps who both signed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the Murthy case, saying that the US government should simply never be allowed to interfere with speech, including to counter election misinformation, and also (just days later) voted to ban TikTok.
Over the weekend, the House once again passed a TikTok ban bill (similar to the original with a few small changes), which they bizarrely bundled with funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The bill passed the House 316 to 94, with the yeas and nays following no particular partisan breakdown.
And, I recognize it’s not perfectly fair to see “yea” votes as a clear vote for banning TikTok, given that this was a bundle of (mostly) foreign aid bills that I’m sure some members saw as much more important than the TikTok ban question. However, it does seem notable that so many Members of Congress insisted to the Supreme Court that the US government should never interfere with foreign influence campaigns online, but then voted to ban TikTok, in large part because of the risk that it might try to run foreign influence campaigns online.
Looking through the roll call and comparing it to the signatures on the amicus brief,…
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