What If Free Speech Means Banning TikTok?

by | Dec 14, 2024 | The Atlantic

Many will read last week’s federal appeals-court opinion that could ban TikTok as a loss for the First Amendment, and in some ways it is. If TikTok disappears from the United States, some 170 million Americans will lose access to a platform central to their daily lives and creative expression. And the court’s deference to Congress and the executive branch’s national-security claims continues a pattern of courts weakening First Amendment protections whenever the government invokes national-security concerns.

But the opinion need not be viewed solely through this lens. Significantly, the court rejected the usual framing of national security versus the First Amendment, and instead cast TikTok itself as the First Amendment villain. This approach could have long-term consequences for the government’s ability to regulate the internet.

Historically, when courts have considered cases involving national security and free speech, they’ve treated them as a zero-sum game: either protect national security at the expense of First Amendment rights, or preserve First Amendment freedoms despite potential security risks. Legal observers (myself included) expected the case to follow this familiar pattern, with the court weighing TikTok’s free-speech claims against the government’s national-security concerns about data privacy and information manipulation.

[Read: America lost the plot with TikTok]

But in its decision, the court did something unexpected. In addition to crediting the government’s national-security arguments, it highlighted an important tension within pro-free-expression arguments: the right to access and speak on the platform of one’s choosing versus the right to have platforms free from foreign manipulation and control. The court explained:

In this case, a foreign government threatens to distort free speech on an important medium of communication. Using its hybrid commercial strategy, the [People’s Republic of China] has positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok in order to serve its own ends. The PRC’s ability to do so is at odds with free speech fundamentals. Here the Congress, as the Executive proposed, acted to end the PRC’s ability to control TikTok. Understood in that way, the Act actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment.

This anti-distortion rationale for government speech regulation used to be central to the First Amendment, especially in campaign-finance cases, until the Supreme Court rejected it when striking down corporate campaign-contribution limits in Citizens United v. FEC. Recently, in last term’s Moody v. NetChoice, the Court criticized state laws limiting social-media content moderation by invoking an (in)famous 1970s precedent that the government cannot “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.”

But the anti-distortion rationale lives on in national-security cases. For example, only a year after Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision by then–D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh that foreigners have no First Amendment right to contribute to U.S. elections.

The anti-distortion argument also figured in the concurring opinion by Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which focused on the long history of legislation restricting foreign ownership of key sectors of the U.S. economy, including radio, broadcast TV, and cellular networks. These restrictions were motivated by the same legitimate concerns as the TikTok law: the possibility for covert manipulation of the American information environment. The emphasis here is on covert because, as Srinivasan pointed out, “counterspeech”—responding to objectionable speech with more speech—“is elusive in response to covert (and thus presumably undetected) manipulation of a social media platform.”

TikTok has few good options; the law prohibits app stores and cloud-service providers from hosting TikTok and its app unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, divests, which it is unlikely to do. Donald Trump campaigned against the law (despite trying to ban TikTok during his first administration), but he has backed away from his promises to save TikTok. Even if he wants to help the beleaguered company in his second term, his options are limited, because the key players are private companies, such as Apple and Oracle, that would face penalties for providing services to TikTok.

[From the November 2021 issue: The largest autocracy on Earth]

This leaves the Supreme Court, to which TikTok plans to appeal the D.C. Circuit’s decision. Although the justices aren’t required to hear the case, they may be inclined to, given the high legal and policy stakes. They will also probably pause the law while they deliberate, giving TikTok a reprieve until the Court’s decision this summer. But TikTok may not find that the Court is any more receptive to its cause than the cross-ideological panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit.

Thus, as soon as this summer, TikTok as we know it may not be America’s leading short-form video platform anymore. The longer-term effects of the litigation are less clear. If the Supreme Court embraces the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning that banning TikTok complies with and indeed advances First Amendment principles—especially if it extends this reasoning beyond the national-security context—it could open the door to more assertive government regulation that curtails some speech rights in favor of safeguarding the First Amendment more broadly. Although this would, in certain ways, vindicate a long-standing goal of liberals and progressives to address the flaws of unregulated speech environments, it matters greatly who in the government wields that power—and with the incoming Trump administration, the implications could be unsettling.

Click here to see original article

The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality

by | Dec 13, 2024 | The Atlantic

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about happiness and music but didn’t mention perhaps the most famously joyful work ever written: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1824, which ends with the famous anthem “Ode to Joy,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.” In the symphony’s fourth movement, with the orchestra playing at full volume, a huge choir belts out these famous lyrics: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium / Wir betreten feuertrunken / Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!” In English: “Joy, thou shining spark of God / Daughter of Elysium / With fiery rapture, goddess / We approach thy shrine!”

You might assume that Beethoven, whose 254th birthday classical-music fans will celebrate this coming week, was a characteristically joyful man. You would be incorrect in that assumption. He was well known among his contemporaries as an irascible, melancholic, hypercritical grouch. He never sustained a romantic relationship that led to marriage, was mercurial in his friendships, and was sly about his professional obligations.

Perhaps all of that seems only natural, given the fact that Beethoven progressively lost his hearing and was therefore deaf when he wrote his later works (including the Ninth Symphony). But we have ample evidence that his unhappy personality predated his deafness. Even before his hearing loss set in, for example, he complained bitterly about his music’s shortcomings, as he saw them. He is said to have reviled what was probably his most popular early composition, the Septet in E-flat Major, as “that damned thing! I wish [the score] were burned!”

At the same time, he clearly saw—and regretted—the effects of his unhappy personality. “I can easily imagine what you must think of me,” he wrote to an “esteemed friend” in 1787, “and I cannot deny that you have too good grounds for an unfavorable opinion.”

Perhaps you can relate to Beethoven: You recognize that you have some unhappy personality traits—and, like him, you regret that. If you would like to know how to change and acquire a happier personality, here’s how.

[Read: Beethoven’s punk-rock 8th symphony]

Personality is a focus for many social scientists, myself included, and I have written about it in several different columns. The most common way to measure personality is by using the so-called Big Five Personality Traits, which can be remembered via the acronym OCEAN: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can take this test yourself online and see how you rank on each dimension, compared with the overall population of test-takers.

Scholars have used the Big Five assessment in novel ways. For example, they have found that high conscientiousness is a good predictor of job performance, academic performance, and longevity. Extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are predictive of higher-than-average social-media use; the first two of these (but not the third) also correlate with leadership effectiveness. Risk-taking behavior is associated with high openness and low conscientiousness. Creativity is most related to openness—which makes sense, because a willingness to experiment and try new things is typically part of a creative process.

Scholars have also studied the role personality plays in happiness. Two psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality in 2024 found that up to 54 percent of well-being is explained by the combination that a person has of these personality traits. Researchers have also looked at what causes unhappiness; they identify high neuroticism (which typically makes people feel misunderstood), low extroversion (which can reduce people’s sense of excitement about life), and low conscientiousness (which tends to make a person indecisive).

Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predicts work satisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.

Based on all of this, we can reconstruct a personality portrait of Beethoven. We know that he was generally unhappy, struggled with intimate relationships and close friendships, was intensely creative, and was passionate about his work, but unreliable and dissatisfied with it. So he probably scored very high in openness, fairly low in conscientiousness, low in extroversion, very low in agreeableness, and extremely high in neuroticism.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

What does your own personality profile say about your well-being? Mine is an accurate predictor of high happiness—though also of moderately high unhappiness. This is because I rate near the top in openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion, but am in the middle in agreeableness and neuroticism.

If, like my colleague Olga Khazan, who tried to change her personality, you suspect that your personality is keeping you from living your best life, you may want to accentuate the positive elements and dial down the negative parts. The research on this is clear: With targeted effort, you can do so.

To begin with, realize that what you do matters a lot more than what you feel. For example, just because you feel disagreeable doesn’t mean that you must inevitably behave disagreeably. To do so is to hand management of your life over to your limbic system (which processes emotions) rather than your prefrontal cortex (which enables you to make conscious decisions).

Being ruled by the limbic system is how your dog lives. You can do better.

Feelings aside, make a resolution to behave as a happier person would—someone who enjoys a good intimate relationship, close friendships, and their work. To follow that model, scholars recommend such habits and practices as taking an interest in others and engaging in acts of kindness, counting your blessings and savoring good moments, committing to goals, learning to worry less, increasing your faith or meditation practice, forgiving others, and taking positive steps to get physically healthier.

Easy, right? You don’t, in fact, need to do all of these things, but the research shows that happier people do many of them. And that effect can hold true regardless of your attitude toward doing them: You may feel no desire to do any of them, but if you can manage it anyway, that will probably make you happier.

Amazingly enough, getting happier in this way can change your personality, emphasizing the traits that make happiness easier to achieve and initiating an upward spiral. Researchers writing in the Journal of Personality in 2015 showed that people who score higher in well-being tend over time to become more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable—all of which in turn makes happiness more available to them. Curiously, happiness also tends to make people less extroverted: I’d posit that this simply means that as satisfied people age, they prefer to stay home with loved ones and do their own thing.

[Billy Collins: Ode to joy]

We have no data on Beethoven’s happiness level as he grew older, nor about how his personality changed. A pleasing notion is that perhaps he followed something like the program I suggest above: To become happier, he chose to do something a happier composer might do, and wrote an “Ode to Joy.”

He may even have succeeded. On May 7, 1824, he conducted the premiere to a packed house in Vienna. (In case you are wondering how a deaf man could conduct an orchestra, Beethoven had, standing behind him, another maestro whom the orchestra and chorus could follow.) At the end of the performance—culminating in what was the last movement of the last symphony he ever composed—the audience was jubilant. The attendees rose five times to give Beethoven a standing ovation, and threw their hats in the air, which the composer saw only when the musicians physically turned him around to face the audience.

There Beethoven stood, with an expression of amazement and, for a moment at least, of real happiness.

Click here to see original article