KOSA and other Bad Internet Bills (US-specific for now)
#BadIntrernetBills are moving forward again in Congress and multiple states, so it's time to take action. Groups like Fight for the Future, National Youth Rights Association, EFF, Woodhull Foundation, CDT, and the Internet Society have been sounding the alarm, but Congress is now looking at packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. We're organizing to keep them from sneaking these bad internet bills through.
This community is for news stories, opinion pieces, and action links about these bad internet bills. Please help get the word out!
And if you use microblogging software like Mastodon, please also check out the #BadInternetBills hashtag.
Icon originally from Why we need to openly protest KOSA on Five Nights at Freddy's Wiki, used by permission.
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The thing is, TikTok is not merely speech. It is software. As such, it also instructs people's hardware to do whatever ByteDance chooses, and does so in secret, since it is not built from source code by the people whose devices it controls. This important detail goes beyond communications; it also makes possible various kinds of foreign surveillance, election interference, etc, and these things have become a real threat to democracies lately.
This overlap of free expression ("speech") and software-as-espionage-tool is relatively new compared to the US Constitution, so it should be no surprise that First Amendment protection here is questionable.
One possible solution: Don't ban TikTok, but require its source code to be released to both users and qualified domestic reviewers, and only allow distribution of builds that were verifiably made from that reviewed source code. Even this wouldn't be perfect, since back doors can be designed into software and remain undetected even when the source code is visible. It would at least bring the app/service more in line with "speech", though.
You're not wrong, but none of that is specific to TikTok.
I would welcome open source code for all the software that we allow to run on our devices, but let's not pretend they're all equivalent. It's likely that sensible reason lies behind the focus on TikTok and a few other specific companies. Probably related:
https://gizmodo.com/ahead-of-scotus-hearing-study-finds-tiktok-is-likely-vehicle-for-chinese-propaganda-2000546312
The same could be said for every other proprietary application.
But TikTok, for the most part, is not an app. Mostly it’s just another corporate social media website, like Facebook, YouTube, 𝕏itter, etc. The app versions of these are mostly just a thin wrapper around the website.