China's Retribution

Banning TikTok for real this time: On Saturday, the House passed bills that will send large sums of aid to Israel ($26 billion), Ukraine ($60 billion), and Taiwan ($8 billion), as well as a long-gestating measure to force the divestiture of the video app TikTok.

Now the legislation will need to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden.

The TikTok ban will probably be challenged. “This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican Speaker and President Biden,” declared Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy, in a memo to the company’s American staff. “At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge.”

China’s internet regulator/censor, the Cyberspace Administration, has taken note of the movement on the TikTok bill, which would either ban the Chinese-owned company from operating in the U.S. or force sale of the app to an American owner within a tight timeframe. Forcing divestiture presents a few problems, namely that the proprietary algorithm and source code would likely fail to convey with the purchase, making the app…practically useless.

Not to be outdone by American lawmakers, China’s government on Friday ordered that the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads be pulled from Apple’s app store over “national security concerns” (of course). “A person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China’s president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country’s cybersecurity laws,” reports The New York Times. WhatsApp is used minimally compared to WeChat (owned by Chinese company Tencent). But for Apple—which anticipated this to some degree, and already started shifting its supply chain overseas after having been quite conciliatory to the Chinese Communist Party for many years—to be caught in the crosshairs is a harbinger of more to come.

This type of justification can always be found if one looks hard enough—and China’s censors certainly do. But beware the coming internet wars, and the use of the American TikTok ban as justification for all manner of crackdowns.

Free and open internet? “A Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, posted on social media last month that Russia could use the move to shut down services like YouTube,” argues The New York Times’ David McCabe. “I don’t think the obvious thing needs to be stated out loud, which is that when Russia blocks YouTube, they’ll justify it with precisely this decision of the United States,” said Gorbunov.

Xi’s regime in China and Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, of course, feel quite comfortable taking whatever cheap shots they can at U.S. lawmakers; if they want to crack down on internet freedoms, they can and will, no excuse necessary. But the TikTok bill is certainly escalatory, and it undermines America’s longstanding rhetorical commitment to a free and open internet—or the internet as a “global free-trade zone,” in the words of former President Bill Clinton.

Scenes from New York: Today is my birthday! And on Saturday, I went out with friends (including a grand total of three babies, who were shockingly well-behaved) to eat crab in Chinatown. After that we went to an event in a basement on East Broadway where the books attempted to teach my toddler that rules are for breaking! Marginally better than Ibram X. Kendi’s children’s books, but not by much.

• New York just passed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which sets aside $30 million annually to incentivize hiring new local journalists. “The late addition to the $237 billion budget allows eligible outlets to receive a 50 percent refundable credit for the first $50,000 of a journalist’s salary, up to a total of $300,000 per outlet,” reports Politico. I think it would be fun to troll the legislators by being one of the beneficiaries of this program and then choosing to be the most aggressive muckraker that ever was, scavenging through their records, making them rue the day they were born, etc.
• Tubal ligation and vasectomy trends since Dobbs. Will that Supreme Court decision, which led to abortion being returned to the states (and many states choosing to institute crackdowns), end up actually leading to a lower fertility rate?
• Children in elementary schools all over Poland have been freed from the shackles of homework.
• Protests at Columbia have prompted an Orthodox rabbi on campus sent this message to students:

In response to “horrific” scenes of antisemitic harassment at and around campus, the Orthodox Rabbi at Columbia/Barnard sent a WhatsApp message to more than 290+ Jewish students this morning recommending that they go home until it’s safe again for them on campus: pic.twitter.com/uqAntEICLv

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 21, 2024

• The Cass review—a four-year review of the evidence on child gender transitions that has led the U.K.’s National Health Service to substantially alter its guidance—isn’t important enough for Scientific American to cover, apparently:

Scientific American doesn’t cover the Cass Review — “cass report” and “cass review” net zero Google hits — but instead, the week after its release, it publishes an interview with an activist who believes kids should have full medical automony and that interpreting scientific… https://t.co/C7C19zxYKT

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) April 21, 2024

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