Depending on the day, HN is convinced that
1. free speech is an obligation of private companies to their customers
2. free speech is an obligation of the government to companies
It is neither.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Likewise, as a consumer of content, you no longer have access to the opinions posted to tiktok if it is banned. This may limit your ability to be exposed to certain ideas.
I can post/view short videos to Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, among others. I don't see how any one platform embodies my ability to speak.
It is also notable that the other firms you mention are American, and thus may embody a certain viewpoint and culture.
I find it hard to believe that a single medium like billboards or an app like TikTok is such a unique thing that it's a burden on people to communicate without them.
Otherwise, one might argue that the government can ban specific newspapers as there are other newspapers where journalists can publish, or that the government can cab paper newspapers since people can publish online.
Can the government ban harmful foreign products?
I think so. That is something that is actively being discussed. One could make the argument for that and bring it to court.
Why are you okay with the government preventing you from putting a sign up on your property?
That tracks.
> they are already banned by states and municipalities.
Which means nothing to your argument in support of the government denying you your first amendment rights.
The law is heavily based on precedent. Seems like a big difference between speech and a specific communication mechanism.
What insult?
> The law is heavily based on precedent.
Yes, and that precedent is on my side.
You admit your ignorance, but when people who aren't ignorant contradict your assertions, you double down on your ignorance and consistently move the goal posts.
At the end of the day, you are arguing in support of violations of the first amendment. If you find that declaration insulting, reevaluate why you insist your ignorance is the right approach.
That being said, I'm also open to other people giving up that right and signing onto an HOA.
However, you have to have that right in the first place to give it up.
The executive is unilaterally deciding users cannot have an app on their phone, and that as a US citizen I cannot access APIs in another country simply because the executive has declared it.
For me it is all about how this is implemented and there is no way I can see this not being implemented in a way that serves as a vast expansion of government powers.
Do they shut tikTok out of DNS?
Do they tell people they aren't allowed to install the app?
Do they tell google and apple they aren't allowed to have the app in the app star?
Do they block their IPs from being routed in the US?
There's no real way to bring a "TikTok" ban into effect that doesn't constitute a massive increase of power the executive has to regulate the internet.
On the flip side I 100% think we need to figure out how to get TikTok out of here as it is 100% a tool by the CCP. So I am conflicted and confused.
The point of parent’s comment is calling this oppression of speech is incorrect, and I’d agree. Does that make this any less of a bad thing? In my mind, no! But lets argue for or against it on genuine terms.
Even the media type being blocked still has (albeit worse) alternatives; instagram, youtube, snapchat, and probably others have a similar format that could still be used. So it’s not really preventing us from using the “short clip” format for speech in general.
Maybe I’m just old. But it feels disingenuous to call it an affront to freedom of speech. TO BE CLEAR, it’s not GOOD, and I don’t think it should HAPPEN. But it’s just weird to see the meaning of words shift before my eyes.
I can understand not liking that, but it has nothing to do with free speech. This is regulating commerce.
> There's no real way to bring a "TikTok" ban into effect that doesn't constitute a massive increase of power the executive
TikTok is a company with a balance sheet to protect. They'll pull their app when told to avoid the US government taking their money. Apple and Google will also pull it from the app store. There's nothing new here.
The answer is (2). The first amendment applies to companies because groups of people need organized structures to exercise their freedoms.
It seems clear to me that any company hiding behind Section 230 neutrality cannot also claim to be a member of the press.
Same logic applies to every part of the first amendment:
1. Can government ban the Episcopal Church as long as they don’t prosecute individual members of if?
2. Can government ban Ruthless Records from selling the song “Fuck the Police”?
I'm old enough to remember the radio version of "Fuck the Police" because playing the song was banned.
If it's not TikTok's speech how can they claim the first amendment? The users speaking can just as easily use a different app, website, newspaper, whatever.
This is something you have to argue, not something that you can just declare. And the "just as easily" is where you're going to run into a problem.
"People use a product to speak therefor the product cannot be regulated" is not a claim I'd heard before the TikTok debate. Seems to contradict previous interpretations of the first amendment that allowed the regulation of cable, TV broadcast, and radio.
So everyone is the press and any product used to speak cannot be regulated? This country has regulated TV broadcast and radio for longer than I've been alive so that's a pretty big change.
The government prevents you from communicating with TikTok.
“Banning TikTok would violate the First Amendment. The government can’t impose this type of total ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious, immediate harm to national security. There’s no public evidence of that type of harm, and a ban would not be the only option for addressing that harm if it did exist,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.
Personally, I tend to let the ACLU guide my opinion in these cases, as they are the experts here.
> Depending on the day, HN is convinced that
Let's do this.
> free speech is an obligation of private companies to their customers
The use is common parlance here. In this case, the idea is the company allows it's users to speak relatively freely (within the limits of what their T&C say). The companies generally push toward some level of preferring to allow speech rather than blocking it entirely.
Your average HN person here understands we aren't literally talking about the 1st Amendment in this case.
> free speech is an obligation of the government to companies
In this case, the government can't limit a company's speech. This has been upheld numerous times in the courts. The government can't require a company or people at the company to say something, except in special circumstances.
> It is neither.
It's interesting you take a literal approach to this in a post where you say this: "HN is convinced."
HN is simply two letters. The two letters are convinced of nothing. They are letters and cannot be convinced.
If by HN, you mean Hacker News, this website, then again, the website itself does not think. It cannot be convinced of anything. It's code that returns content.
If you mean people here on HN, the community, then your comment proves your statement is incomplete and, therefore, misleading. It is not just one of two options.
Basically, if you don't understand the context of the use of "free speech" in normal every day conversation and instead want it to be taken one way and one way only, you should really check your comments themselves for the use of colloquialisms so you don't do the same thing.
It’s not really the day as much as it is whether they feel personally victimized or not.
The Restrict Act basically allows the US to impose Chinese-level censorship across the "Western" internet and persecute any one in the US who helps circumvent the censorship.
Sure it may be used to ban Tiktok, but what do you think will happen when the next whistleblower posts content online? What happens when the US finds cryptography for us normal people a threat to US democratic process? Ect ect...
Calling it the TikTok ban is just clever marketing sugar to make the censorship go down...
I don't recall it saying anything about banning specific apps.
Correct me if I read the summary of the Restrict Act wrong.
This statement is at least as misleading as the "Tiktok ban" rhetoric you're criticizing.
If the act is passed, the only thing stopping the government from taking it to such an extreme is the self-control of the government itself. That isn't very reassuring.
This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media. Considering how magnificent CCP's censorship machine has grown into today, the slope is not that slippery.
Perhaps we should ban the app, while allowing the web site.
This is the justification for censoring China's official government media in the west.
It's absolutely bizarre that they can censor China's government media on the grounds that it might contain messages from the Chinese government. We're long past the slippery slope; we're not even coherent. It's so dumb that we have to pretend like the government of China is a revolutionary terrorist organization in order to convince people not to question the logic of suppressing the speech of designated enemies.
I think Oracle was the frontrunner to acquire it.
TikTok isn't even novel either. Before TikTok there were Vine and Musicly. Removing TikTok isn't speech suppression since other platforms can easily take their place.
It sounds unfair from the perspective of companies wanting a right to market access, but companies do not have rights, people do. People's right to freely choose where they get their information from trumps companies' non-existent right to have the government shut out their competitors.
Reciprocity is there - follow PRC media filtering (read censorship) laws. There's a reason google and facebook both had internal projects to engineer PRC compliance to reenter PRC before internal corporate dissesnt shut it down. The only reason western platforms were booted from PRC in first place was not censoring calls for violence / terroism post 2009 minority riots because muh freedom of speech, but actually because following PRC filtering requirements = onerous moderation (read expensive) that every PRC platform had to follow (and pay for). Few years later western platforms get roasted for radicalization/violence and realized PRC was precient in social media censorship and forced to adopt their own bulk moderation systems and realize some tweaks can get them back in PRC market. Like if US wants genuine reciprocity, just do a JV like in PRC that favours US interests. Even PRC hasn't implemented something as bold as a force sale or "ban" for largely following domestic PRC laws.
The punchline is that it amounts to a bill of attainder, so in order to avoid that criticism, they're going to create censorship laws for all media and simply promise to selectively enforce them.
How so exactly w.r.t TikTok? And how do you know it's not already being censored or manipulated to show you content that makes you think it would be bad to ban TikTok? Of course this is anecdotal but I haven't come across very many people who use TikTok and support a ban, but I have come across many people who don't use TikTok and either don't care or do support a ban.
A much more interesting element here anyway is that Bytedance wasn't paying their dues to Republicans or Democrats via lobbying and so they're using this continued "threat" to get Bytedance to pony up like all the other tech companies. That's the actual dangerous thing here.
My thinking is probably is not logical on this, rather emotional: I like quality news organizations like Democracy Now sometimes taking a hard look at US foreign policy, etc. (and for years I have given them monthly donations because it is difficult to find good news sources). It feels good to praise my country when it deserves praise and criticize its behavior when it deserves it.
I don’t like a foreign government like China attacking our culture. My analogy: we can criticize the behavior of our children who we love, but no one else can.
Promoting divisive content (eg, “critical theories”) that foment divided societies based on grievance narratives — cloaking that anti-social behavior under benevolent guises (eg, calling rebuilding institutional racism “equity”).
Given that we’ve watched those grievance narratives trigger widespread violence and arson before an election and a permanent state of racialized looting, I think the US is beyond the point of fixing this with such mild measures. (And TikTok is hardly the only problem.)
And the US hypocritically screams about how even forcing us to disclose our NGOs is “anti-democratic” (eg, in Georgia).
edit: I'm not from US but it seems pretty obviously a thing a country that cares about security in the information age should be able to do. It does not mean banning apps left and right, but if a viral app is owned by a country that has open animosity to you and the app clearly does shady things (remember injected keyloggers in tiktok's webview?) it may be critical to be able to ban it quickly. If it's not possible, that's just a massive security hole. This seems like all there is to it
We had some founding fathers who were libertarian in nature, but today's crop of libertarians don't have the same education level, class, or philosophical understanding that our founding fathers did, so they don't focus on key distinctions.
Protection from foreign interests is a government concern, while controlling individuals is not a government concern.
They frame the conversation around them being controlled rather than a foreign interest being fought for mindshare. The framing determines the assessment.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/China-s-companies...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/12/communist-cells-influence-co...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinpings-subtle-strategy-to-...
Yes, you got it. Perfect. We have 200 years of first amendment jurisprudence, there are limited cases where it's acceptable.
Your argument is a slippery slope you decided to slide down. You're saying, if we do this one thing we'll end up with no power to regulate.
China has been financing the US for years. That's not what I would define hostile.
> Should Congress be allowed to take actions to stop Russia from spreading misinformation designed to destabilize the US?
Then it becomes easy to frame any dissent as "enemy sponsored" and ban it. You are thinking like WW3 blown up already.
This is them dipping their toes in. It'll get much worse if this passes.
As a philosophical exercise, how dangerous is "banning" fentanyl?
Treating it as a criminal issue rather than a health issue is arguably quite bad. Giving the government control to suppress what we can put in our bodies, and how we choose to exercise our pursuit of happiness is a dangerous precedent. Yet those who try fentanyl often become enslaved to it. They lose their freedom because they don't understand the consequences.
I don't think it's so easy to apply a rule like "freedom good, restriction bad." I think the parallels to fentanyl are philosophically sound.
That is cargo cult politics. It's applying the ritual of "supporting freedom" without understanding where freedom comes from.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
> They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Letting an anti-democratic, anti human rights, arguably Han supremacist, foreign adversary exercise a great deal of influence over your people is an extremely dangerous game. China has every ability to enshittify their products to support the CPC, just like our own social media products are enshittified for their investors or advertisers.
54% percent of Americans can't read at a 6th grade level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
At the very least, if you want freedom, you must support education, but you run into exactly the same problem. What if you have an unchecked lever to choose curriculum. What if the people in power do the wrong thing?
> All it takes is a president with radical views and an ineffective congress and you have a much more powerful censorship apparatus.
Then you get to the core of the issue. If you want good governance, you need good governors. Good governors are one such "something essential" that separates ritual from actual. If fascists are getting into power, maybe the more important thing is to focus on how that is happening and how to prevent it. It is probably not good to let ultimately fascist entities become popular enough to get into power by being good, and then use that power for evil once they have enough that they don't need to grow anymore.