And if you have free speech without exceptions, foreign actors will see it as a weakness and use it to brain rot your society.

Yeah, the government loves to be the only one that can brain rot their (loved that you used the possessive pronoun!) society.

When did the US citizens become so subservient to their government? I thought distrusting the government was American tradition?

I think we as Europeans would do better if we actually defended against Russia's hybrid warfare.

I understand all these principled stances and I do support them ethically, but sometimes you have no choice but to choose the lesser evil.

> When did the US citizens become so subservient to their government?

Technically speaking, they did in 1789. As to the practicality of it, the US government expanded massively from 1900-1950, so maybe during that time period. The FCC was formed in 1972, so on the issue of permissible purveyors of brain rot, maybe then.

Btw, I used “you” as a reference to the sovereign democracy society, not the government.

This is just the paradox of tolerance, if you allow everything you won't be free for long.

You are misinterpreting Karl Popper.

Free speech should only stop on those trying to attack free speech. If anything, it applies in reverse here.

Free speech is not about the "who" but the "what".

In this case the "what" is whatever bias TikTok wants to put in their algorithm that we have absolutely no visibility or control over.

> This is just the paradox of tolerance, if you allow everything you won't be free for long.

This. As a nice clear-cut example see the propaganda being pushed on how Haitians were somehow eating everyone's pets. Even if someone somehow ignores the extremist call for violence, the fact that this propaganda campaign was targeting perfectly legal and legitimate immigrants should be very telling.

Your example has nothing to do with the paradox of tolerance. At least not with Popper's version.

By the way, where was this meme pushed? TikTok? X? I don't think it has much to do with who controls a particular social network.

Shout fire in a crowded theater. Its literally the first example in that you aren't allowed to say anything you want whenever you want. You only have protection against government retaliation.

Or at least you're supposed to

In the US, shouting fire in a crowded theater is expressly allowed per Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969. It puzzles me why it is so often trotted out as an example of things you can’t say since we had a whole Supreme Court case that determined the opposite — it is arguing the losing side. The kind of speech that is disallowed in the US is very narrow, much narrower than people apparently assume.

Supreme Court already said free speech is not an issue in its ruling to uphold ban of TikTok, stop trying to argue for something that isn't there

The Chinese government does not have the right to free speech in this country. And since they are the ones controlling the algorithm that controls what people see on the app, then it's China speaking not the people who are posting.

The black box algorithms that are at the heart of TikTok and Instagram are very powerful and have the potential to be very dangerous mind control weapons, quite literally. It should all be blown up, but keeping that weapon from China is good.