With the sort of detailed personal profile a social media app has on you, they could target your specific beliefs, religious convictions, sexual preferences, political affiliation, fears, interests, desires, etc. to manipulate your opinion in their interests. Doing this on a population-wide scale is what social media platforms are all about (i.e. targeted advertising). It's wise to be concerned about an adversary having such a tool at its disposal. And this is true for all countries, not just the US.
charonn0
joined 1 year ago
No, but it does prohibit companies in those four sanctioned countries from operating social media apps in the US. The fact that it's not a perfect protection is no good reason not to do it. The fact that it was written with an eye towards the first amendment is not a valid criticism.
It's not too specific, it's narrowly tailored. Which is one of the things it needs to be in order to survive a 1st amendment challenge.
The law affects social media apps based in North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. These four countries are already restricted from participating in sensitive areas of the US economy, with forced sale being an option. The only really novel part of this law is applying such restrictions to software.
And the fact that a foreign adversary obtained this information was very bad, agreed? Clearly, it makes sense to take steps to keep that kind of information out of adversarial hands.
The United Kingdom is not an adversary of the United States. In fact it's one of our closest allies. But, if anything, that suggests this law isn't enough, not that it's too much.
It's not ok.
But the fact is that China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia are adversaries of the United States, and the US government is justified in its concern.
If social media apps exist to slurp up as much user info as possible, and they do, then it makes sense to be concerned about the government that they're subject to.
Nostradamus was right!
That's about 1609 times the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in one 299792458^th^ of a second.
Narrator: it wasn't.