Montana's Governor's Changes To TikTok Ban Bill Would Ban All Social Media Entirely (techdirt.com) 137
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has returned an "amendatory veto" to the legislature regarding the state's unconstitutional "ban TikTok" bill, proposing alternative draft language that inadvertently could ban all social media platforms in the state due to poor drafting. The revised language targets any social media application that collects personal information and provides it to a foreign adversary, but since most social media networks collect such information and share it with entities in foreign countries, it would effectively ban all social media in Montana. Techdirt reports: As [1st Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn] points out, the new draft targets any "social media application" that allows for "the collection of personal information or data" and allows for "the personal information or data to be provided to a foreign adversary or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary." Now, some might think that sounds reasonable, but the details here matter. And the details reveal that EVERY social media network collects such information and provides it to people located in countries designated as a foreign adversary. And that's because "personal information" is a very broad term, as is "provided." [Ari writes:]
"'Surely,' you might think, 'that just covers the data platforms amass by monitoring and tracking us, right?' Perhaps not. The bill doesn't define the term, so who knows what it means in their heads. But we have an idea of what it means out in the real (online) world, by way of the regulations implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Those regulations include in the definition of 'personal information' things like: First and last name; Online contact information; A screen or user name where it functions in the same manner as online contact information. In other words, the types of information that accompany virtually every piece of content posted on social media. If a platform allows that kind of information to be provided to any foreign adversary or a person or entity located within a foreign adversary, it is banned from Montana.
Do you know who might be persons located within a country designated as a foreign adversary? Users. Users who are provided the kinds of 'personal information' that are inherent in the very concept of social media. So, effectively, the bill would ban any social media company that allows any user in China, Russia, Iran, or Cuba to see content from a Montana user (and this is a generous reading, nothing in the bill seems to require that the data/information shared be from a Montana resident). On top of it, each time a user from one of those countries accesses content, platforms would be subject to a $10,000 fine. Do you know which platforms allow people in those countries to access content posted in the United States? All of them. Congratulations, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte. You just managed to accidentally ban all social media for Montanans. Good work."
"'Surely,' you might think, 'that just covers the data platforms amass by monitoring and tracking us, right?' Perhaps not. The bill doesn't define the term, so who knows what it means in their heads. But we have an idea of what it means out in the real (online) world, by way of the regulations implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Those regulations include in the definition of 'personal information' things like: First and last name; Online contact information; A screen or user name where it functions in the same manner as online contact information. In other words, the types of information that accompany virtually every piece of content posted on social media. If a platform allows that kind of information to be provided to any foreign adversary or a person or entity located within a foreign adversary, it is banned from Montana.
Do you know who might be persons located within a country designated as a foreign adversary? Users. Users who are provided the kinds of 'personal information' that are inherent in the very concept of social media. So, effectively, the bill would ban any social media company that allows any user in China, Russia, Iran, or Cuba to see content from a Montana user (and this is a generous reading, nothing in the bill seems to require that the data/information shared be from a Montana resident). On top of it, each time a user from one of those countries accesses content, platforms would be subject to a $10,000 fine. Do you know which platforms allow people in those countries to access content posted in the United States? All of them. Congratulations, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte. You just managed to accidentally ban all social media for Montanans. Good work."
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
... he posted on Slashdot from his account as part of a discussion, a process on a site which technically meets the definition of a social network.
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You are right... doesn't mean he can't still be all for that. Frankly, I don't think I'd lose that much from not being able to share my two cents.
I am still clinging to times long past, where people usually valued my two cents. At least for the most part. These days, on here too, people are just looking for a way to interpret whatever you say in the worst possible way.
I really don't need that and only addiction makes me come back.
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Slashdot has been circling the drain for 20 years. Ban it. See if I care.
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And yet we're still here. Let it circle forever.
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Slashdot has been circling the drain for 20 years. Ban it. See if I care.
You are suffering from social media addiction. You hate something, want it banned and yet desperately seek to be a part of it. Get some professional help.
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You hate something, want it banned and yet desperately seek to be a part of it.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat
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The way this bill is written, without defining anything, the Montana govt could still classify /. as such.
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You have eyes. You can read. ... Why not just read the actual edits and use your brain...
Says the person that didn't read the actual edits.
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Here's the definition in the bill:
Is Slashdot:
- An internet-based electronic application? Check.
- Can content be shared by users? Check.
- Does that content include any of the f
I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Interesting)
If this law is enacted I would seriously consider moving to Montana!
Social media is a sewer. Just like a sewer, if you wait long enough, something shiny might go past. But you'll still be waist deep in shit.
Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:4, Insightful)
If this law is enacted I would seriously consider moving to Montana!
Social media is a sewer. Just like a sewer, if you wait long enough, something shiny might go past. But you'll still be waist deep in shit.
If this went through, Montana might become the most productive state in the union!
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You're far more likely to get hurt by something and die from sepsis before finding some gem in sewage.
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exactly.
Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Informative)
Social media is a sewer.
he declared on a social media site without any sense of irony.
You do understand that /. is social media right? (Score:2)
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But how would you tell everyone about your new life as a dental floss tycoon if there's no social media?
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If this law is enacted I would seriously consider moving to Montana!
Why? I get it, you hate "Social Media"; however, Arizona is not forcing you to use "Social Media", neither is California or Montana. What would you gain by moving to Montana?
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......says the hypocrite using social media right now...Or do you think Slashdot's comment section doesn't qualify?
Slashdot is a news aggregator with a comments section. No images, no video. No selfies or emojis.
Slashdot has a moderation system that, while not perfect, is more than just "like/dislike" or a popularity contest. Up and down moderation is capped so it's impossible to bury unpopular comments completely, and silly memes can't always float to the top.
Slashdot doesn't serve up ads that look like user-generated content in the middle of real user-generated content.
Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Informative)
Under this bill, Slashdot would be defined as social media and banned. As would most websites you visit.
Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot is anti-social media.
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Slashdot is anti-social media.
So 4chan and Something Awful would be fine as well!
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Aliases are included in the definition of personal information
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So this law obliges to implement AC posting? Awesome. We had for a decade, we could comment on blog platforms without an account. Now only Wikipedia retains this ability.
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Ok, maybe, and if it is, so?
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And perhaps we would all be better for it. At the very least, we would get some time back in our day!
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Yes, but I had to face my troll victims in person, and they'd stuff me into trash-cans.
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The most important lesson for any kid K-12 is how to fight.
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We also survived for millennia without ICE vehicles, libraries, Christianity, firearms, pr0n, electricity, voting (in general, and by certain groups of people), fireworks, sugary drinks, and things made of plastic. Doesn't mean it's ok to get rid of all that...
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Re:I'm... ok with this (Score:5, Insightful)
"Social media" does not limit itself to the likes of TikTok and Twitter. Stack Overflow and GitHub can be considered social media too as they are user-contributed and support social interaction through comments and following. And developers probably get more value out of these as they do from traditional libraries (it doesn't mean they don't get value from libraries too).
Many more traditional social media like Reddit, YouTube or even TikTok offer a lot of educational, factual content if that's what you go for. Lots of trash in there too of course, but all libraries are not particularly clean either. For instance, I don't think libraries in North Korea are all about "factual knowledge".
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I really don't think 'making the world smaller' has made anyone happier.
The world shrunk due to telecommunications and world wide transportation of people and goods. Taking away "social media" is not going to change a damn thing.
The thing is NONE of that requires it to be international!
We could easily simply require these sites to silo by nation.
I really don't think anyone should be making such decisions for everyone else.
Ukraine is a great example. Social media allow the Eurotrash to convince the American public to finance and supply another one of their conflicts that are inconsequential to us.
This is a terrible example. War in Ukraine is extremely consequential to the entire world. In the atomic age a world that tolerates right of conquest rather than enforcing article 1 of the UN charter is a world with no future.
US military expenditures on Ukraine are a dirt c
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> We also survived for millennia without ... pr0n,
I don't think there's evidence to support this.
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We survived for millennia without social media
"We", also didn't represent 8 billion humans in the past. And the real bitch with that statistic? We humans still need jobs to survive.
Whether you like social media or (like me) rather despise it, it's quite difficult to argue against the obvious; social media has created millions of jobs worldwide. You're OK with it? Let's see how "we" is OK with paying more taxes to fund social programs then.
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"We", also didn't represent 8 billion humans in the past. And the real bitch with that statistic? We humans still need jobs to survive.
Do you believe there is a certain critical mass of global population beyond which pool of reserve labor can no longer equilibrate? What is the linkage is between global population and job availability?
Whether you like social media or (like me) rather despise it, it's quite difficult to argue against the obvious; social media has created millions of jobs worldwide. You're OK with it? Let's see how "we" is OK with paying more taxes to fund social programs then.
At what opportunity cost? How many jobs were lost as a result of people choosing to stare at a computer display instead of going out and doing something else?
For example while Amazon "created" millions of jobs it is generally understood if it were to go away globally more not less jobs would be generated as
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"social media has created millions of jobs worldwide"
Warfare has also created millions of jobs (and deaths) worldwide over the last few thousand years, yet I doubt anyone thinks we should keep armies to cut back on unemployment.
Cancer has created many many jobs worldwide, but no one worries how curing cancer could cause all those people to lose their professions.
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We survived for millennia without social media
No we haven't. Social media is literally just an extension of the old town square notice board. Even Slashdot is considered a form of social media.
What we've survived for millennia without is TikTok and Facebook.
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We survived for millennia without social media
No we haven't. Social media is literally just an extension of the old town square notice board.
An extension you say?
The town square notice board didn't ever turn children into narcissistic attention whores completely addicted to reading that bulletin board every hour of every day in order to sustain their societal self-worth, ultimately having everything they do turned into The Product being bought and sold, while being addicted to that town square drug for free. That drug and addiction is so powerful today that pediatricians now have a valid concern regarding mental health and suicide risk with chi
Brought to you by (Score:1, Flamebait)
The party of personal responsibility and limited government,
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I don't give a fuck who they are, this is a good thing. Go back to giving your personal information to Fuckerbook if you don't like it.
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Go back to giving your personal information to Fuckerbook if you don't like it.
He might want to do just that, but for poorly defined reasons the party of personal responsibility won't let him.
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Who says I even use facebook? This law is unenforceable. How do you tie an IP address to a physical location?
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There are commercial IP-based geolocation services and have been for decades. You don't look to ARIN. You underestimate the number and breadth of data brokers that exist out there.
But it would be unenforceable anyway because of the commerce clause.
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But it would be unenforceable anyway because of the commerce clause.
That is not even remotely how the commerce clause or dormant commerce clause work.
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Telling people they can't freely associate with a business when that business is out of state is absolutely trying to regulate interstate commerce.
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The product is advertising anyway. The interaction on the platform is just free speech.
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Whether it is a first amendment violation is a whole other ballgame.
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>How do you tie an IP address to a physical location?
Are you new to the internet?
People have been doing that for at least 20 years.
It isn't reliable. GeoIP data is often flawed, pointing to the location of the company that owns the IP address rather than the actual location where the IP address is being used.
If you have a sufficiently scattered network you can do triangulation based on pings and trace routes, but that is only likely to get you to within a state or even country.
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It's good enough to avoid getting in trouble with the state if they make reasonable effort. It doesn't have to be perfect.
When it comes to IP addresses for domestic users or consumers, the geolocation tends to be their ISP's egress point. That can vary wildly. Some ISP's have egress in a whole different part of the country. However, when it comes to the state, they can generally pressure ISP to tell them exactly what account was using that IP at that time.
When it comes to datacenters, that gets more tricky. Sometimes its actually accurate, sometimes its the location of the corporate headquarters. But again, the nation-state wh
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And StackExchange? Your favorite vBulletin or phpBB forum? IRC? They would all fall under the definition of social media in the bill, and they're mostly accessible from China. If it's online, users can share content, and they can be identified by a unique username, then it's social media.
For Fuck's Sake (Score:3)
Just write better privacy laws.
If ANY data is collected, it will eventually make it to a adversary, as there is no stipulation on the buying/selling or sharing of said data (or being hacked from a database).
All this hand-wring over banning this or that misses the point and looks suspiciously like security theater.
So facespace plasters my shit all over Beijing (Score:3, Insightful)
and they're supposed to be the good guys in this morality tale?
Just because there's a bad guy doesn't mean the other party is the good guy. It is perfectly possible and perfectly reasonable to eat some popcorn as two entities I don't particularly care for slug it out.
I suppose the free speech absolutist in me should object, but as the last several years have made painfully clear, no one who has any influence in either dominant party, in any media outlet, educational establishment, or cultural institution actually gives a flying fuck about free speech anymore if it means allowing someone somewhere to say mean something disagreeable to them.
It was a fun ride while it lasted, and it's a shame since the rest of the world is demonstrably worse than America regarding free speech, but I guess the party's over and it'll probably stay that way for the rest of my lifetime.
a review of the Wilson administration (Score:1)
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Re:So facespace plasters my shit all over Beijing (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose the free speech absolutist in me should object, but as the last several years have made painfully clear, no one who has any influence in either dominant party, in any media outlet, educational establishment, or cultural institution actually gives a flying fuck about free speech anymore if it means allowing someone somewhere to say mean something disagreeable to them.
The difference comes down to how it's being enforced. So-called cancel culture and platforms giving people the boot isn't on the same level as the government saying you can't have social media at all.
And don't for one moment think us "leftists" are immune to being snagged in the major platforms' shenanigans. I've been temp banned from /r/politics for mentioning that someone called me a "faggot", and my partner has been given timeouts from Twitter for arguing with homophobes on several occasions. Again though, that's not the government's doing - it's businesses who simply don't want controversial content irritating their sponsors. [getyarn.io]
Re: So facespace plasters my shit all over Beijing (Score:3)
Politics is downstream of culture.
Normalization of private-sector censorship will lead to government censorship when the current crop of politicians and appointees ages out and is replaced by seasoned practioners of deplatforming and cancel culture.
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It's just history repeating itself because we refuse to learn from it.
You say that (Score:2)
why so badly drafted? (Score:3)
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None of those things are "lawyer" - the thing that lawmakers used to have as their background. Although programming is the closest thing to analyzing syntax for unintended consequences. Then again, there's a lot of insecure software out there.
Re:why so badly drafted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Add in right-wing mandatory stupid and of course the result smells like a dumpster fire in a field of bullshit. (Note clever reference to typical high tech Montana industrial base.)
Next up in Montana culture war: statewide ban on electricity because it could be used by drag queens to put on make-up.
Re:why so badly drafted? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious how this could be so badly drafted. Some legislators just aren't very smart, but this comes from a Governor who has a bachelors in electrical engineering and an MS in computer science and has had a successful career producing software. His politics are not mine, but he's not an idiot and has worked in fields where you to be precise. Why can't he write legislation that does just what he intends?
You don't need to be an idiot to do something stupid.
In fact, the best way to do something really stupid is to be smart enough to think you know better than "the experts" without actually putting in the work required to be right.
Re:why so badly drafted? (Score:4, Interesting)
but this comes from a Governor who has a bachelors in electrical engineering and an MS in computer science
Does it? Or does it come from some lobbyist / interest group and was passed on verbatim?
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Look at the voter base he has to pander to.
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Why can't he write legislation that does just what he intends?
Money. Someone wants something and is willing to "distort reality" to get it. That is how we end up with nonsense laws.
Do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Slashdot is social media ... ...as is any site that allows comments
Fun Fact (Score:3)
He co-founded a software company [wikipedia.org], so in theory he should have had some idea how this software stuff worked.
He also body slammed a reporter for asking him questions.
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He also body slammed a reporter for asking him questions.
When you shove that kind of statement under "fun fact", I feel rather compelled to request the video clip worthy of a WWE highlight reel.
Stack Overflow (Score:2)
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You don't need stackoverflow to be a programmer. Granted, it's a useful site, but you can program without it.
People were writing software long before the internet even existed. It was arguably better code as well. It was certainly smaller because it had to be and was generally tighter because processor speed, memory, disk space - if you were lucky enough to have disks - were one or two orders of magnitude worse in terms of performance than they are now. You keyed in your programs on a console or punched c
Poor drafting? (Score:3)
For once, politicians accidentally do something positive and you call it poor drafting?
Congress has no idea how it works (Score:5, Funny)
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Watching the TikTok hearing was like watching monkeys try to figure out how to use a phone.
The concept of sharing short video clips between humans on the internet dates back to the damn 90s. I'll bet even the monkeys eventually learned how to operate that damn phone. When the hell are we going to stop electing morons who apparently never learn...
Ban social media in MT (Score:2)
I hate social media (Score:3, Insightful)
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why not just been Tiktok that's what they're tryin (Score:2)
And what the hell does bill of attainder mean
Come on, let it pass (Score:3)
I might have missed something... (Score:3)
...to the legislature regarding the state's unconstitutional "ban TikTok" bill,...
Did any court find that the bill is unconstitutional? Or, is this an editorial/opinion article...
What You Missed. (Score:2)
A court cannot find a bill unconstitutional. That step is reserved for after a bill passes and becomes a law.
Therefore, calling the bill unconstitutional is an opinion.
It's an opinion of the same level as "I like the feeling of the sun shining on me" or "{political party I oppose} is corrupt, incompetent, and dedicated to ruining America."
or... (Score:4, Insightful)
....y'know, they COULD just stop harvesting personal data?
I know, that's a crazy idea.
Not just personal data, ALL data is subject to law (Score:2)
Not just 'personal' data, which isn't defined anyway. Any data to a foreign adversary.
Maybe these laws should first only apply to the Government for the 1st year to ensure the laws work. If the Government cannot comply, then no private company can.
Not sure if good... or bad (Score:2)
That said, social media networks are trash and getting rid of them altogether would probably be a good start at least in the US. If they operated with the same restrictions as Europe in the US that would be a different story, but they'd probably have no income if they can't ste
It's Montana (Score:2)
That's fine. (Score:3)
We could very much change how we design our websites and how we collect data. There really is no reason that we can't change our social media to be entirely based in the USA and stop selling that data to foreign entities.
I think it's a great move overall.
Not just social media (Score:2)
Re:Let me guess (Score:4, Insightful)
Aaand doing further digging:
https://aricohn.substack.com/p... [substack.com]
1) Lawyer
2) Blog created in the last month called Platforms & Polemics
3) Focuses on first amendment and tech policy
Sure smells like a lobbyist...
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
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I honestly don't see any problems with this so long as they well define what a foreign adversary is.
I don't think you understood what you read, because defining 'foreign adversary' doesn't address the issue here. "Foreign entity" isn't the problematic language, "a person or entity located within" is the source of the problem. Then again,
And it's not as if users in these countries have access to begin with as odds are American social media platforms are already banned in these countries.
I'm terribly curious what difference you think this makes to anything you are saying, or why you point it out. This also has no bearing on anything, since the language of this particular bit of brilliant drafting specifies platforms that "allow" for the provision of da
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What's funny is that Gianforte made his fortune founding a tech company that he sold to Oracle (After repeatedly assuring his employees that he would not do).