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| ‘The TikTok law, like the Al Jazeera one, isn’t limited to its initial target.’ Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA |
The White House rightly said it was “concerning” when Israel’s parliament laid the groundwork to shut down Al Jazeera within its borders in April. On Sunday, Israel made its move. The Foreign Press Association called it a “dark day for democracy”.
If the White House remains concerned, it has a strange way of showing it. Joe Biden and his administration have supported and encouraged recent censorial laws and court cases that virtually ensure that “dark days” are ahead at home as well.
The best-known example is the bill Biden signed into law last month to ban or force a sale of TikTok. Like Israel’s Al Jazeera ban, that law relies on unsubstantiated assertions of national security concerns, ignoring Justice Hugo Black’s prescient warning in the Pentagon papers case that “the word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the first amendment”.
Another thing the two laws have in common is that it’s an open secret that those concerns are pretexts for silencing the growing backlash against the Israel-Gaza war. Senator Mitt Romney essentially acknowledged as much in a recent conversation with Antony Blinken, the secretary of state. He wasn’t the first to say the quiet part out loud.
The TikTok law, like the Al Jazeera one, isn’t limited to its initial target. It opens the door for future bans of other platforms – including foreign-controlled online news outlets... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/israel-al-jazeera-us-tiktok-ban[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
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