Lawmakers Who Insisted The US Gov’t Should Never Combat Foreign Influence Online, Vote To Combat TikTok’s Foreign Influence Online

Is the US government allowed to step in to deal with foreign influence on social media or not? According to at least some members of Congress, the answer appears to be “yes, when we dislike what they’re saying, and no when we like what they’re saying.”

When the original House bill to “ban TikTok” passed, David Greene and Karen Gullo at EFF noted the odd contrast of dozens of Congressional Reps who both signed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the Murthy case, saying that the US government should simply never be allowed to interfere with speech, including to counter election misinformation, and also (just days later) voted to ban TikTok.

Over the weekend, the House once again passed a TikTok ban bill (similar to the original with a few small changes), which they bizarrely bundled with funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The bill passed the House 316 to 94, with the yeas and nays following no particular partisan breakdown.

And, I recognize it’s not perfectly fair to see “yea” votes as a clear vote for banning TikTok, given that this was a bundle of (mostly) foreign aid bills that I’m sure some members saw as much more important than the TikTok ban question. However, it does seem notable that so many Members of Congress insisted to the Supreme Court that the US government should never interfere with foreign influence campaigns online, but then voted to ban TikTok, in large part because of the risk that it might try to run foreign influence campaigns online.

Looking through the roll call and comparing it to the signatures on the amicus brief, I find 13 members of the House who both think that it is clearly unconstitutional for the US to try to respond to foreign influence peddling, but who also believe that they could ban TikTok in response to concerns about foreign influence peddling.

The amicus brief is pretty clear on this point. It complains, specifically, about the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. It suggests that it acted illegally in trying to respond to foreign influence peddling: “The federal government, specifically the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), also used its power and influence to deceive and coerce social media companies.”

The amicus brief claims this is a clear First Amendment violation. From the brief:

Thus, the First Amendment stands against any governmental effort to coerce or otherwise burden the free speech of private entities— even if that action falls short of outright suppression.

And yet… when it comes to Reps. Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik, Kelly Armstrong, Aaron Bean, Kat Cammack, Jerry Carl, Scott Fitzgerald, Russell Fry, Erin Houchin, Darrell Issa, Ronny Jackson, Max Miller, Guy Reschenthaler, and Claudia Tenney, apparently it’s only not okay for the government to burden the free speech of private entities when those entities are not connected to China. Then, suddenly, principles go out the window, and of course the government can do this.

After all, those Reps both signed the amicus brief and voted in favor of the TikTok ban. To be fair, this is a smaller number than those who voted for the original TikTok ban. However, that difference is mainly explainable by the fact that many of those who voted no here simply do not want to provide foreign aid to Ukraine.

Still, though, it would be nice if elected officials weren’t so openly hypocritical all the time. As the EFF post a couple months ago noted:

We believe there is an appropriate role for the government to play, within the bounds of the First Amendment, when it truly believes that there are posts designed to interfere with U.S. elections or undermine U.S. security on any social media platform. It is a far more appropriate role than banning a platform altogether.