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.