While the censorship of TikTok is in limbo, that hasn’t stopped mainstream media from speculating on what should be censored next.
When the US Supreme Court ruled that mass government censorship doesn’t violate freedom of expression, it seemed that all bets were off when it comes to free speech. The precedent set was that all the US government has to do is scream “NATIONAL SECURITY!!!” and the courts will waive those annoying basic civil rights including freedom of expression.
Of course, all of this jeopardizes hundreds of thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars in economic activity, but basic common sense and reality did nothing to stop this disastrous outcome. Instead, both the government and mainstream media relied on conspiracy theories like how TikTok is a Chinese mind controlling device and that the platform was a unique threat to people’s personal privacy. There was never any actual evidence to support any of these claims, but now that we live in a post-truth society, facts and reality really don’t matter much any more anyway, so if the mainstream media says that TikTok is a mind controlling device, it is hereby declared that this is the undisputed truth and that we should all act accordingly.
Much to the fury of some people, however, I continue to insist in living in the land of reality. So, as all of this TikTok nonsense was going down, I wrote a piece arguing that the US was repeating the exact same mistakes it did when Napster was originally shut down. In that article, I wrote how the takedown of Napster initiated an endless game of whack-a-mole where when US authorities took down one file-sharing program, two or three others popped up, taking their place. It was a losing battle in the end that ignored the economic reality that the world has changed and has gone digital. There’s no way to sue your way back into the 80’s no matter how many lawsuits you filed against, well, everyone.
The reason I made this point was because users began flocking to alternatives like Lemon8 and RedNote. Well, right on cue, government officials were already pushing to have RedNote censored as well, suggesting that I was completely right in pointing out the historical blunders and suggesting that we are on the cusp of repeating those mistakes.
For me, the real question is just how far government was going to go in their quest to censor it all. As I’ve long pointed out, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Recent precedent suggests that the government would be all too happy to greatly expand censorship once the precedent is put in place. That has to do with the debacle that is age verification laws. Indeed, for the longest time, supporters of age verification laws swore up and down that these laws are only there to stop minors from viewing pornographic material and nothing else. Once these laws are in place, society would somehow be better off and there is no way that age verification laws would get expanded into other areas.
Yet, those arguments were already blown out of the water. On the one hand, supporters later admit that age verification laws are actually just a stepping stone for a full ban on porn. On the other hand, supporters and government have already been pushing to expand these age verification laws onto other things. This includes the push to expand age verification laws onto video games, social media in general, and even app stores.
Ultimately, I’d submit that we’ve already seen and established a pattern of how government behaves and how the mainstream media supports such idiocy. After all, we’ve already seen some in the mainstream media fully admit that they hate free speech and have no qualms with doing away with it. So, it really wouldn’t come as a surprise if the media starts pushing outright censorship to other platforms even if the TikTok censorship has become, well, complicated.
Well, right on cue, this is exactly what the mainstream media has already started doing. Earlier this month, the US government designated gaming company, Tencent, a military organization. Here’s a report from the Register at the time:
The US Department of Defense has added Chinese messaging, media, and gaming giant Tencent to its list of “Chinese military companies”, a designation that won’t necessarily result in a ban but is nonetheless unpleasant.
Tencent appeared in a Tuesday update to the “Section 1260 list” [PDF], a document that US law requires be compiled annually to list companies operating in the USA that Washington wonks believe participate in China’s “Military-Civil Fusion strategy”, under which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) works with local companies to ensure it can get the technologies it needs to modernize and defend the People’s Republic.
The updated version of the list doesn’t explain why Tencent was added, and the company has said its inclusion must be an error.
However, it’s not hard to see how China’s military could rely on Tencent, whose WeChat messaging platform and related payment service are both utterly ubiquitous in Chinese daily life. WeChat is also thought to be a key channel Beijing uses to deliver its desired messages to the Chinese diaspora. An Australian Senate committee has recommended WeChat be banned from use on government-owned devices as it can be used to gather intelligence about users. Canada went a step further and banned the app from government kit. Tencent also operates a public cloud, an enterprise-grade collaboration environment called VooV, and security-as-a-service offerings that resemble those delivered by Cloudflare. The PLA could use any or all of the above.
This is not evidence that the US government is seeking to ban the company (given Tencent’s ties with Epic, the makers of Unreal Engine, it would be a monumentally stupid idea), that didn’t stop some mainstream media members from speculating that they could be censored next. From Forbes:
There has been a lot of talk about how if the U.S. government can vote to ban an entire social network from the country, they might do that with other social networks if they don’t like what they’re doing, even perhaps U.S.-based ones. But I’m wondering about what happens if they stay with the Chinese angle, particularly if they turn their attention toward one of the biggest players in the video game industry.
That would be Tencent, the Chinese mega-corporation that owns or has a piece of extremely huge video games publishers and developers with some of the biggest games in the world, but also in the U.S. specifically. Given that Congress and the government in general often seems widely disconnected with the things they are regulating, a move like this does not seem impossible.
To be clear here, the Forbes author here is an idiot for even thinking this is worthy of a news article at all. Even the author admits that the government banning Tencent, at least at this point, is unlikely:
Is it likely something like this would come to pass? Perhaps not, but if the government ends up understanding just how integrated Chinese companies into a huge number of major U.S. video games, most played by children, that may raise alarms. For now, I’m not sure they have any idea.
Seriously, why is that even worthy of a news article? I had originally started writing this article the other day in response to this stupidity, but when I got to this paragraph, I dismissed the whole idea of an article as being so stupid that there’s other things to concern myself with and wrote something else instead.
Well, what I hadn’t considered at the time is that this is more representative of the mainstream media’s appetite to go on a massive government censorship spree. Today, I found out that other members of the mainstream media have started pushing for other companies to get censored as well, forcing me to re-write this whole article again. In an article on The Independent, writers there are trying to make the case that a router company should also be censored:
Ater TikTok was handed a lifeline by President Donald Trump, lawmakers worried about Chinese influencer over U.S. tech have found a new target: a popular home-internet router.
The TP-Link has been targetted by lawmakers who are concerned the routers could be exploited and used to steal sensitive information, CNBC reports. Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and John Moolenaar penned a bipartisan letter to the Department of Commerce last year asking the agency to investigate the “unusual degree of vulnerabilities” the routers reportedly present, The Wall Street Journal reported.
TP-Links are among the top-selling routers on Amazon, and up to 65 percent of the U.S. router market belongs to the company, according to CNBC.
If you think that is stupid, well, there’s more. In another article on Newsweek, writers there are gunning for the censorship of AI startup, DeepSeek:
Chinese startup DeepSeek has caused a massive stir in the AI world, with Donald Trump looking set for another TikTok-style headache amid concerns over DeepSeek’s competitive edge and privacy policies.
Newsweek has contacted the Trump-Vance administration and DeepSeek, via email, for comment.
Former Republican U.S. Congressman Patrick McHenry (North Carolina), who has often worked on economic policy and financial regulation, is one of several who made this comparison and expressed concerns.
He told MSNBC that DeepSeek “has a massive ripple effect where faster, better and cheaper still wins no matter if it comes from a communist state or an open society.”
“We also don’t yet understand fully the data transfer that’s happening with this new app,” he said, later adding: “Is this a more sophisticated TikTok?”
Seriously, this is getting asinine. What part of “privacy reform” don’t these outlets or the government understand? If you really give a shit about privacy, that would be your number one go to move. Censoring random companies on the internet is like trying to empty an ocean with a normal sized drinking glass. It’s not worth the effort. What’s more is the fact that this is extremely damaging to the online ecosystem in general – not to mention the unintended consequences this spawns.
What’s more, all you are doing is erecting a Great Firewall of America in the process. One of the major criticisms of western society has with China is the troubling human rights record. One aspect is the massive amount of censorship that is pushed onto the people. Yet, here we see a push for the US government to do the exact same damned thing.
What’s more, don’t think that all this censorship is going to be exclusively tied with anything associated with China. Sooner or later, that censorship is going to get applied to other things. This might include anything related to abortion medical information, LGBTQ content, environmental science, and anything else the US government deems ‘impure’. We’ve already been through this with age verification laws and there’s no reason to believe there is no way this is not going to happen here as well. Censorship creep knows no boundaries or borders. It will keep spreading and spreading thanks to the limitless potential of a good old fashion moral panic. When it gets out of hand, we can point to the TikTok Supreme court ruling and say, “that was the day everything changed. I wish we understood the consequences better at the time.”
