This is a psyop by parties that will continue full speed ahead to get their opponents to stop running - much like climate hysteria.

Now we get to see what would happen if a technology as dangerous as thermonuclear bombs was easy for anyone to make with string gum wrappers and glue.

Why not train an AI to write similar books in real time?

What if they had a robot that turned the pages and sent you live video of the book while you were reading? Or, buy Internet Archive could buy the e-book, and have the ability to work and view the screen in real time?

Or just host it in a foreign adversary's jurisdiction and fart in their general direction?

I have made them my enemy or they have made me their enemy, you say tomato I say potato. Whatever. The Chinese state is a corrupt authoritarian communist mercantilist adversary that fiddles the currency markets to make labor artificially cheap to obscure what is essentially tarriffs, and uses the proceeds to bribe and bully other nations officials and companies, genocides its own people and harvests their organs, plays at being a developing country so it can ship world wide for free while pushing climate hysteria to get its competitors to live under restrictions if will never have to follow and generally suck.

There were once laws against a person owning too many of the papers in a city. Media ( especially social media where it pays users to be where the other users are ) tend to be natural monopolies or oligopolies. Sure there are very minor players and slightly differerent niches but not too much competition. I agree that media in general has fallen under the control of too few people.

Tik Tok absolutely needs banning. China is willing to force it's businesses to do its bidding economic damage be damned, so that China as a whole can use its economic might to bully individual businesses into doing the CCPs bidding. If you deal with those who ignore the CCPs bullying tactics your business will pay. So even if you aren't directly vulnerable, you will find yourself unable to deal with others.
In order not to cede total control to the CCP the west needs to be willing to decouple with the Chinese economy completely. ( seriously forcing Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores would be 'banning' enough to kill TikTok off - lemmings can't be bothered )

Those with control over social media can with the push of a button make something go viral or stop things from spreading. They can push ideas perspectives and encourage behaviors.

This is terrifying power in the hands of domestic social media. Allowing enemies to wield it directly is stupid.

But this bill won't do anything because it's obviously unconstitutional and would be struck down. It allows people to posture against TikTok without actually passing a legal law.

Privacy concerns are the least of the concerns.

Instead of sending users to jail for speaking to foreign adversaries or attempting to get around it using VPN or TOR they could make China divest itself of TikTok or (narrowly addressing privacy concerns) they could bar foreign adversaries from collecting any more personal data than is allowed for under 13 year olds ( which is apparently possible as it's been done for a while now ). This would have the side effect of killing TikTok.

'Foreign Adversaries' are why we can easily pirate things, and why there are search engines that haven't been captured by the woke censorship apparatus.

But they *ARE* adversaries intent on wreaking destruction. So they need to be prevented from making money to use to build up an information warfare arsenal and armies of vulnerable lemmings that can be activated at a moments notice, or groomed to destroy society.

Let people seek out opposing views but don't let adversaries make a dime in the US.

The law shouldn't prevent use of the service.
TikTok already disallows under 13 year olds from signing up because laws on data collection make them unprofitable.

Make entities under the jurisdiction of foreign adversaries treat EVERYONE as under 13 year olds. Enforce it the same way this law is enforced. No collecting personal information. No money nothing. You can have tik tok and people can view it but ban them from making a dime off it.

This bill is designed to fail by being struck down because they all want to vote to ban tik tok which should be done, but they don't actually want to ban anything.
Users could face up to 20 years in jail for performing transactions with entities and people under the jurisdiction of foreign adversaries such as china and whoever they wish to declare as such.

(17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.

This means making a phone call to someone in China would get you 20 years in jail since you made their phone ring using their phone network. Using yandex would get you 20 years. Using a VPN or TOR to get around it would land you in the clink.

When they start enforcing anti-trust around the bank\ing system in such a way that no matter what legal thing you want to do there is a bank willing to do it, then talk to me about crime enabling. While we're stuck with the mastercard/visa/paypal oligopoly and while big players can use their market dominance to bully the little players to conform ( and the very existence of this power is evidence of monopoly/oligopoly ) then anti-trust crimes are being ignored and enabled.

If only they could keep the Noncitizens from voting...

Here's the thing, people get de-banked and cut off from payment systems, not for breaking the law but for being controversial. Cryptocurrency is a way around that.

This. If it were not useful to someone, it wouldn't be used by anyone.

Dog-King when? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...