> How about guns?

Imports of firearms and ammunition from China to the USA have been banned since 1994 [1]. IIRC Chinese companies were caught selling rifles and other gear to known gangs in California and that motivated the law.

Firearms imports are also much more restricted generally than most other categories. More than one manufacturer has reincorporated in the United States because of the regulations.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355...

Fair enough — was wrong on that point, and happy to be corrected.

> we just removed the voice of countless communities that had formed on TikTok.

They just move to new place. Loads of online communities have died/migrated for various different reasons over the years.

> We have freedom of speech in this country

This doesn't impose on your freedom of speech at all.

Just because you have the right to say anything, doesn't give you the right to say it where you want.

> This doesn't impose on your freedom of speech at all.

By this logic, the US government should be able to ban any newspaper that is publishing articles that they don't like: it doesn't encroach on the freedom of speech of the reporters of that newspaper, they can just speak somewhere else. They don't have the right to say anything at that particular newspaper, just in general.

Of course, in reality, banning a publication (TikToK) because you think they may publish stories that you won't like (propaganda for Chinese interests) is an obvious violation of the first ammendment and a form of government censorship.

tiktok isn't a publication and the ease with which people can post on other platforms as well as their relationship to the platform is relevant

I agree that there are differences between a publication and a platform, but they are relatively subtle. And as long as the argument is "China through TikTok can influence which content is popular or allowed to be published at all", then that is leaning into the publisher-like aspects of TikTok, not the platform-like ones: and it is precisely these rights that are protected.

Just to give an example of what would be concerns of the platform aspect of TikTok, that would be concerns about the ability for the app to deploy malicious code to users' phones, or the amount of data that it siphons off legally. But those are de-emphasised in favor of their control on content, which is precisely what's supposed to be protected by the Constitution.

No, because the ban is based on TikTok coming from a geopolitical adversary, rather than being based on actual content (which is why the Supreme Court declined to stop the implementation of the law).

Huawei is also controlled, even more directly, by a geopolitical adversary, and is not banned for regular consumers in the USA.

The reason TikTok being owned by China is considered a problem is because it could allow China to control what American citizens see on their timelines - the content.

The US passes many laws about traffic safety, and yet much of US road design is actually deeply unsafe. Inconsistent sure, but that doesn't mean they were lying about the unsafe things they did ban.

> The reason TikTok being owned by China is considered a problem is because it could allow China to control what American citizens see on their timelines - the content.

It's the PRC control part that's the key here though. There's nothing banning even blatantly pro-PRC content on other platforms. You can find plenty of tankies praising China over the US to high heaven on places like Reddit.

> It's the PRC control part that's the key here though. There's nothing banning even blatantly pro-PRC content on other platforms. You can find plenty of tankies praising China over the US to high heaven on places like Reddit.

Then it's just virtue signaling. If the message is not a problem, then who says that message is irrelevant.

Note: to be clear, I'm neither a tankie nor in any other way supportive of PRC policies. They're a horrible genocidal dictatorial regime with imperialist tendencies who are propping up other similarly horrible regimes like Russia or North Korea.

> By this logic, the US government should be able to ban any newspaper that is publishing articles that they don't like:

Freedom of speech is that an American person cannot be blocked by the government saying what they want.

There is nothing in the first amendment that protects you from where you can say what you want, nor is anyone entitled to give you a platform.

That's why the US has "freedom of speech zones" which are basically cages far away from where they should be protesting.

TikTok was banned because it's owned by a foreign government, not freedom of speech. If the Chinese government had removed their connection to it, it would not have been banned.

I think those comparisons are poor - TikTok is service that could be used to send instantaneous information to 170 million users in the US. It's potential to cause a problem if it's controllers choose to do so is many orders of magnitude broader and faster than those examples.

China doesn't allow foreign corporations to operate within their borders. why should we?

there is no First Amendment right for Chinese companies to operate within our market. there is no First Amendment right for RT to be carried on US cable networks.

if TikTok were a website, it'd be different. it'd be one thing if the US were blackholing tiktok.com. but TikTok is an app that sells ads, and they're not entitled to sell ads to US businesses or publish on US app stores.

> China doesn't allow foreign corporations to operate within their borders

It's not true, just to clarify it.

Many foreign corporations operating in China, only if they:

1. Keep all user data within the border. 2. Cooperate with censorship

TikTok meets the first condition in the U.S., and I think the issue lies with the second condition.

I could be wrong, but I thought you have to operate a subsidiary in China, which is majority Chinese-owned. for example, Azure China is operated by 21Vianet, who also owns all the infrastructure.

Yeah, that's the part 1, all data must be within the border

so Azure in China can only be ran by a Chinese entity

If you look at it from the other side, it's like Tiktok must be hosted by Microsoft/Amazon but not datacenters in China

>China doesn't allow foreign corporations to operate within their borders. why should we?

China is a dictatorship where people have no rights. America was built on the principle that the government shouldn't have the power to tell the common people what to do.

The idea that the US government doesn't have the power to regulate trade, especially with geopolitical adversaries, has never been some bedrock principle of America.

> there is no First Amendment right for RT to be carried on US cable networks.

There might be, but it would be the cable network's first amendment right to carry them, not RT's right to be carried.

The argument in court was kind of backwards, nobody violated TikTok's rights by taking them off the app store, but you could fairly easily argue that Apple and Google's rights were violated by telling them that they can't carry it. That would, presumably, require either Apple or Google to bring a lawsuit though, and they seem to want to play nice with the incoming administration.

Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of a platform. Their speech isn’t limited.

Imagine saying this if the government shut down, say, a newspaper publishing things they didn’t like. “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of a platform; the reporters can write elsewhere.”

Idk for the US, but where I live, newspapers have special laws that protects them more than other platforms. Pretty sure it’s the same in the US.

That is not correct.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed in the first amendment, "freedom of the platform" is a non-existent right.

And what makes TikTok different from a newspaper, fundamentally?

Both are publishing stories written by others (reporters for the newspaper, subscribers for TikTok), and taking decisions on which stories to publish (through direct editorial control for the newspaper, through the algorithm + some direct editorial control for TikTok).

Newspapers are not platforms; they are publications. They have editors who set editorial policy. They are selctive about the content they publish and who writes it. And they are accountable for what gets published.

TikTok is mainly accused exactly of having an editorial policy, via boosting certain content that its owners prefer and de-prioritizing content that they don't. So this is a non-sequitur. And even when talking about false information, newspapers face 0 legal risks for publishing false information, unless it is defamatory (and even then, it's a civil action, no state prosecutor will investigate a paper for publishing false and defamatory information).

No one is talking about “freedom of the platform”. The literal text of the First Amendment with regard to these things is “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. If the government shuts down a venue because they don’t like what people are saying there, they are abridging those people’s speech.

Those communities can form else where. There can be another short form video platform.

Why do they have to? And if there is, what argument is there that we should stop just at this one platform?

Because TikTok is owned and controlled by hostile foreign country of communist totalitarians. That country would rather TikTok die than be sold to an operator they don’t control.

The operator doesn’t necessarily have to be American. A European operator would be sufficient. But it can’t be an overtly hostile nation.

All of these arguments have been made ad nauseum.

All social media companies controlled by the CCP will be banned in the US. And since all tech companies in China are controlled by the CCP that means all Chinese social media products will be banned in the US.

It’s not all that complicated. It’s not even that controversial.

Basically everything I buy now means my money is going to China. Somehow that's ok, but letting me choose to consume their app, that's ok.

Correct. Buying things manufactured China is not the same as a CCP controlled a social media algorithm. They're extremely different things with extremely different impacts. Thus one can be ok and one can not.

The issue isn't money going to CCP. The issue is data and CCP control of the algorithm.

yeah because the issue isn't money going to china its prc control over a major social media platform

None of this is strong enough to justify banning speech to me. Do you think something like the Communist Manifesto should be banned in the US? Do you think someone professing the virtues of communism on a street corner should be forced to stop?

Freedom of speech means that you can’t be persecuted for what you said. It doesn’t mean you are entitled to be given a megaphone.

You can say what you want and don’t go in prison, sure, but nobody owes you the platform.

That’s like saying “you can write whatever book you want, but the government can stop it from being sold; we aren’t obligated to sell it in bookstores”. This is a terrible argument; it conflates the government’s actions with the “bookstore”. Yes, if the app store decided to ban the app, we wouldn’t have much recourse. But the government is stepping in and saying no bookstore is allowed to sell it. That is textbook censorship (no pun intended).

No, freedom of [edit: accidentally wrote "from" earlier] speech also means that the government can't stop you from saying it. If US citizens wants to publish pro-Chinese, anti-US propaganda in the USA, and want to constitute a company for publishing a newspaper or a social media site to do, that is protected free speech and the government should have nothing to say about it.

You're conflating trade and speech, just like every other PRC defender here.

The exact same content on TikTok could be replicated by another company coming from some other country and it would be totally fine and unbannable. Which means it's not actually about speech.

You think that a social media app is trade?

Why does who runs the app matter? Stopping someone from saying something is still silencing them, even if someone else saying it would be okay.

This is just setting the groundwork for the government controlling social media even more than it already does, because they know how influential it is.

I'm not defending the PRC in the slightest. I fundamentally disagree with the government forcing a sale of a company due to its social media app. This is different from every other example of banning PRC-backed companies (ex: Huawei, TP-LINK, etc) because there is genuinely a plausible argument for natsec. With TikTok there just is no such argument, other than the video content being controlled by a foreign hostile entity. And I just fail to be convinced that that's enough to ban it. Do we ban Russia Today?

> You think that a social media app is trade?

When it crosses international borders? I'm sorry, but duh?

Do you think websites and apps somehow aren't trade? I'd love to hear your reasons for internationally used online services not counting as trade somehow, that's gonna be fascinating.

I think that considering TikTok's shop feature, it would be, but to me the dictionary definition of "the business of buying and selling commodities, products, or services; commerce" wouldn't apply to a free social media app otherwise. It lacks the critical transactional nature.

> It lacks the critical transactional nature.

I'm sorry, what? You realize they're still making money off you, right?

I don't think "if the product is free, then you are the product" is 100% right, but it's not entirely wrong either.

A business' offerings being ad-supported doesn't somehow stop them from being commercial in nature. Hence: trade.

I guess it would be a form of countertrade of attention for content. Nonetheless I don't think a "trade" of social media content and ads should be something that is within the government's scope to ban. If TikTok was made ad-free, would that change your argument?

That you don't consider it trade is irrelevant. It is trade, and trade has always been within the scope of the government -- every government, really -- to regulate.

> If TikTok was made ad-free, would that change your argument?

I think as long as TikTok is generating revenue -- or even plans to in the future, as sometimes happens for startups -- it'd count as trade yeah.

> Are they not allowed to sell books in the United States?

They would not be allowed to own the publishing company.

> How about guns?

This doesn’t have anything to do with media.

> Can they release major motion pictures?

They would not be allowed to own the publishing company.

> Video games?

They would not be allowed to own the publishing company.

The people in these communities still have a right to assemble and say things to each other. It’s more difficult to do so on TikTok after the US distribution ban but it’s ByteDance who made it impossible with this play; this service shutdown is not a requirement of the law.

Trade and speech are not the same thing, and this sort of conflation is really tiresome.

If we banned China from importing video games into the US, that would be a trade issue.

It's very ironic you bring this up though, since China is famously very strict about what foreign media it allows in, and really about how foreign businesses in general are allowed to operate there.