That ban already seems doomed to failure as Congress prepares to vote on a nationwide TikTok ban bill next month. The biggest hurdle isn’t gathering enough votes, but drafting a ban consistent with measures he passed in the 1980s to protect the flow of ideas from hostile foreign countries during the Cold War. .
These decades-old measures, known as the Berman Amendments, were previously invoked by TikTok creators who sued to stop Donald Trump’s attempted ban on TikTok in 2020. The Foreign Affairs Committee told Ars that these measures are considered the biggest obstacle to lawmakers trying to block the app from working in the United States.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal said that lawmakers’ dilemma when enacting the ban was how to block TikTok without “stopping the global exchange of content or incurring retaliation against U.S. platforms and media.” Some lawmakers believe it’s achievable by creating a narrow carve-out of TikTok under the new law, while others, like McCaul, believe it’s a national security concern. We believe that a more permanent solution to protecting the interests of TikTok in the long term is to create more permanent and thoughtful laws that allow bans. protected by a foreign country.
The White House has yet to comment on how the Berman Amendment may have affected talks with TikTok, which have been going unresolved for the past two years.
What is the Berman Correction?
Back in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), giving the president powers to impose sanctions on adversaries and oversee trade. The plan was to prevent the average American citizen from supporting America’s enemies, but the law plagued publishers doing business with book authors and filmmakers based in enemy countries. Out of concern, Rep. Howard Berman (D-California) proposed an amendment in 1988 to remove “information and intelligence materials” from IEEPA and prevent the President from regulating these materials. passed.
As technology evolved, another IEEPA amendment specifically exempted electronic media in 1994, and to this day everything from Tweets to TikTok has been freed from presidential regulation under the so-called Berman Amendment. It remains unclear how this is preventing Congress from passing new laws, but the WSJ said lawmakers would not allow legislation to restrict her TikTok if it could threaten those protections. reports that they are hesitant to create
At least one legal expert told the WSJ that it would be considered appropriate for Congress to reconsider the law in the light of rapidly advancing technology since 1994. He told the WSJ that the Berman Amendment remains very popular and is being defended by both parties as an important free speech protection.
Berman, who now works at the law firm that blocked President Trump’s TikTok ban, said the decades-old amendment has hampered efforts by lawmakers concerned about national security interests today. He declined to comment to the WSJ on possible
