A group of over 25 Democratic members of Congress have raised allegations against X, once again ignoring the First Amendment and calling for online censorship.
We’ve noted many times how the GOP’s obsession with TikTok is stupid, performative, and utterly hollow. For example, the party desperately wants to ban TikTok for “privacy reasons,” yet consistently opposes passing privacy laws, or regulating data brokers that traffic in far more data — at a far greater international scale — than TikTok executives could ever dream of.
For all the (mostly misleading) talk of the US government having too much say in content moderation decisions, this move would literally put US government officials effectively in control of content moderation decisions for TikTok. Apparently the thinking is “welp, it’s better than the Chinese government.” But… that doesn’t mean it’s good. Or constitutional.
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Honestly, what this reads as is the moral panic over China and TikTok so eating the brains of US officials that rather than saying “hey, we should have privacy laws that block this,” they thought instead “hey, that would be cool if we could just do all the things we accuse China of doing, but where we pull the strings.”
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So, look, if we’re going to talk about US government influence over content moderation choices, why aren’t we talking much more about this?
CFIUS monitoring agencies, including the departments of Justice, Treasury and Defense, would have the right to access TikTok facilities at any time and overrule its policies or contracting decisions. CFIUS would also set the rules for all new company hires, including that they must be U.S. citizens, must consent to additional background checks and could be denied the job at any time.
So, we’ve been talking a lot about age verification of late, as governments around the world have all (with the exception of Australia?!?) seemed to settle on that as a solution to “the problem” of the internet (exactly what that problem is they cannot quite identify, but they’re pretty sure there is one). Of course, as we’ve explained time and time again, age verification creates all sorts of problems, including undermining both privacy and speech rights.
The U.S. government, through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), proposed a draft agreement last summer that would grant it extensive access and control over TikTok‘s operations. This move comes as an attempt to address national security concerns related to the Chinese-owned app. A draft agreement, sourced from Forbes, outlines the following potential powers for the U.S. government:
Wrote to Tammy Baldwin about how Republicans want to censor LGBT content with the KOSA bill that she is sponsoring! I included the following Techdirt article in my email! Not one word, about it, in her reply to me (which is just a form letter)! In fact, I didn’t bring up anything that she mentioned! As she is a LGBT person, I thought that she’d be concerned but I guess not?!
Meanwhile, Republicans are now freely admitting that they’re going to use KOSA to force websites to censor LGBTQ content. They’re literally proud of it. The Heritage Foundation, which at least used to have some principled stances before being taken over by culture warriors without any principles, is bragging about how it will use KOSA in this manner:
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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