Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Ultimately, banning or not banning TikTok has no bearing on how social media platforms more broadly should be or will be regulated. Congress can’t agree yet on the former, but a pretty broad coalition developed in favor of banning TikTok.
A couple of weeks ago on TWiT, Cathy Gellis spoke about her perception of first amendment issues around banning TikTok.
But left mostly unsaid are the enormous first amendment problems with regulating the content on, and operations of social media broadly. I think any such laws and regulations would need to be tweaked and revised as courts affirm and reject legal arguments in light of the principles of free speech and free association. With the glacial pace of such things, you would need a large and durable coalition in Congress and the White House to make it happen and keep it in effect.
Banning TikTok was a low hanging fruit. For better or for worse. Trying to tie TikTok with regulating other social platforms is applying an intellectual viewpoint to a political question. Congress doesn’t operate on intellectualism.
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As always Amy Webb shines and elevates the conversation. And, for those of us in ClubTWIT, the lack of censoring beeps made the conversation flow better by leaving in the spice. Made it seem more like a good convo between friends.
I find it really interesting that the people in positions to understand (Brianna Wu, Amy, etc) seem to support the TIkTok ban. It seems to go against what I would think, and yet I have to consider there’s a perspective I lack because the people I respect here feel the ban is appropriate.
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The problem, especially with Brianna, is that she says there is good evidence, that she has seen, to back it up, but nobody who has seen the “evidence” can talk about it, leads to it being at best, the political equivalent of mummy knows best.
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That is a problem.
The way I look at it: at some point, I have to trust somebody who knows more than I do that they know what they’re talking about and that they know what they are doing. After that - it’s whether or not they have a particular agenda.
I trust Amy Webb enough that when she expresses an opinion different from one I hold, I have to at least give it the courtesy of serious consideration.
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I agree with you, I have a lot of respect for Amy and Brianna, but “secret” evidence always makes me suspicious.
If it national security, say so and treat it as such.
This has the feeling of lobbying to it.
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In an interview with Nancy Pelosi on British TV this weekend, she was asked about the ban and said the same thing. Something along the lines of if you were given the same info as we were, you’d fully support the ban. Suggested some very specific national security threat, but of course, could give no detail 
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN we had to invade Iraq because they were refining yellow cake to make weapons of mass destruction.
We invaded. Hundreds of thousands died. Thousands of young Americans were tramautized.
And it was all a lie.
Forgive me for being skeptical, especially when 1. US companies benefit hugely (and have been lobbying for this ban for years) 2. Absolutely nothing is being done to protect Americans’ privacy or to defend us against misonformation and propaganda. Banning TikTok is the very definition of security theater.
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For the most part - I agree with you, Leo. I am skeptical as well. I’m only saying that people who are credible to me are saying otherwise. And I feel like, because I find them credible, that I have to at least consider that I might be incorrect.
Regarding chip foundries outside Taiwan, GlobalFoundries has the former AMD & IBM plants in the US and Europe. Tower Semiconductor is an Israeli company which has foundries in Israel, Italy and the US (Intel recently abandoned a bid to buy Tower Semiconductor). Samsung is a major chip foundry out of Republic of Korea and the US.
Besides TSMC, Taiwan also has UMC, which has fabs in Taiwan, mainland China and Japan.
TSMC operates a bunch of legacy nodes. In their 2022 annual report they listed the following process sizes: 130, 90, 65, 40, 28, 16, 7, 5, and 3 nm. 130 nm was the node the Pentium 4 “Northwood” chips were based on, circa 2002, so it is now quite aged.
Many of the companies selling chips on “legacy” nodes (Texas Instruments, Infineon, SK Hynix) operate their own fabs. Much easier to make the math pencil out when you make the same 1Gbps Ethernet chips for 20 years without pushing the bleeding edge.
Yeah no one has ever shown me the actual problem, more only say “potential” threat or something like that.
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