> if a foreign power can buy the platforms and adjust information flows to "shift" public opinion their way.
NO.
I will never accept this premise and nor should any American. The people ARE the government and they can be influenced any which way they want to be. There shouldn't ever be any such thing as the government "protecting" people from influence. If the people want to all tune into some foreign broadcaster all day and love everything he's saying. That's how the country will be.
The second you accept "oh foreign influence is manipulating our voters to X or Y so it has to be stopped" you are signing the death warrant for free speech. This is EXACTLY the justification used in all sorts of authoritarian garbage places to suppress information and restrict speech
I agree with you on this. People who don’t believe this fundamentally do not believe in democracy.
You may worry about citizens being sufficiently educated, you may worry about them having access to enough information to make good decisions. But to restrict information for fear that they may make the “wrong” decision—the one you don’t like—there is nothing democratic about that.
Foreign voices and perspectives are critical to understanding the world as a whole and making informed decisions. If the population isn’t ready to take in that information and sort the wheat from the chaff, then they aren’t ready for democracy.
Sure, but there's a difference in intent and degree between "foreign influence is manipulating our voters" via political content on TikTok vs a targeted state sponsored campaign run by intelligence agencies.
There are some common sense guardrails around elections in a democracy, and foreign influence targeting the actual election process is generally viewed as over the line of acceptability.
> foreign influence targeting the actual election process is generally viewed as over the line of acceptability.
Nope. "Influence" is just content. Free people can consume whatever content they want, even if it's about elections. Period. End of story. Either you're free or you're controlled.
That's a severe oversimplification. The world isn't black and white.
Take free speech, which has certain restrictions in most societies. Some societies draw the lines further than others.
Likewise, when it comes to elections, the election process is controlled to some degree. One can't, for example, broadcast misinformation about mail in ballots, because that would threaten the integrity of the democratic process itself.
There are countless ad absurdum arguments that could be made here, but that one will suffice. Say a foreign entity broadcasts misleading information about mail in ballots as part of a wider campaign to convince certain sections of the population that the post office is changing votes. Would banning that activity change a society from a "free" state to a "controlled" state like some sort of binary switch? Of course not, and typing "Period. End of story" is a completely asinine and amateur argument to support that. Devolution into semantics.
What I'm highlighting is that in most democracies, there is a sacrosanct ring around the democratic process itself - arguably necessary to at least some extent - and in the context of misinformation/state meddling/etc that would fall under the category of "election interference" if a certain bar is cleared. Ideally a high bar, so the red tape is as minimal as possible, but when it comes to state intelligence agencies specifically targeting an election itself, there is not just a coherent argument for it, it's the way it is in most democracies worldwide.
You and I both know the US was not interested in forcefully taking over TikTok because of the possibility they could broadcast misinformation about mail in ballots near to election time
That is a crime because it is fraud (election fraud). If this arose on TikTok the great thing is, you can prosecute the creators who post such things. China, by promoting such stuff, in fact would make the prosecution job easier.
People in these comments talk about "influencing" people to have certain thoughts and thus change how they vote by showing them stuff that might change their minds. That is the very idea of free speech itself and it should never be under government control. Not fraud but exposure.
NO.
I will never accept this premise and nor should any American. The people ARE the government and they can be influenced any which way they want to be. There shouldn't ever be any such thing as the government "protecting" people from influence. If the people want to all tune into some foreign broadcaster all day and love everything he's saying. That's how the country will be.
The second you accept "oh foreign influence is manipulating our voters to X or Y so it has to be stopped" you are signing the death warrant for free speech. This is EXACTLY the justification used in all sorts of authoritarian garbage places to suppress information and restrict speech