I don't care about the First Amendment specifically. The US constitution is not magical divinely inspired scripture. I care about the underlying principles of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association, regardless of how well or poorly those are reflected by a specific written law.

This is the problem.

We can't be certain that a foreign actor couldn't destabilize our faith in our government by pushing pro-palestinian content.

A small push on a platform can snowball since creators take the stances that don't get them cancelled or want to mimic the popular opinion

Does that count as pro-Palestinian?

Reddit is both anti-Israel and anti-Palestine depending on the sub. News channels will be one or the other depending on the slant and there's plenty on both sides. Most of instagram is people from both sides shouting at each other about how the other gets more representation/are more evil. Same with facebook. I don't use Twitter or any Twitter clones, but I assume Mastodon has a Palestinian slant while Twitter probably has a slight Israeli slant (shitposting aside). Even on HackerNews you'll see both stances often. I guess 4chan would have my stance, since they hate Israel because antisemitism but also hate Arabs.

Do people just make shit up like this for a laugh? I really don't get it, yet see it so often espoused.

Reddit shows pro-palestinian/anti-israel propaganda in the front page on a daily basis.

Also, the fact that Israel's invasion of Palestinian territories was an anti-Biden propaganda point that was boosted pretty hard doesn't exactly prove that the likes of China aren't pushing propaganda to destabilize the US. There was clearly a coordinated effort to force-fed the idea that Biden was pro-genocide and a warmonger, and Trump was the only possible candidate to push peace in Ukraine and Palestine.

Genuine question from a non-American: does the 1st amendment only apply to US citizens?

Citizens in the US are implicitly allowed to do whatever they like, subject to laws that the government enacts. The constitution describes those areas where the government is allowed to pass laws. All other areas are off limits to the government, and left for the people to do as they like. To emphasize the point, the amendments specify certain areas that the government is extra-especially-not-allowed to create any laws about, like speech.

The extent to which this is observed today is quite dubious. There are lots of laws that the US government passes which have little to do with anything the constitution allows them to do - but they kinda hand-wave around that and gesture toward something, like the "commerce clause" or whatnot as justification.

But in theory - for any law passed - it is unconstitutional unless you can say exactly where in the constitution it is explicitly allowed.

* Having written all that, I will add that "government" above means the US Federal government, not all the other ones. State, local, have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it.

The major difference is the Tenth Amendment, which sets the states apart by specifying that any powers not "delegated to" the federal government are reserved exclusively for the states. (In practice courts have found many "implied powers" that are not explicitly enumerated).

Federal laws are distinct from the Constitution.

The Constitution, its Amendments, and decisions of the Supreme Court are not 'federal laws'.

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However TikTok US here is a domestic organization operating domestically merely controlled by a foreign organization operating abroad, which complicates matters. It has rights.

A later amendment is held to have "incorporated" this prohibition against the state governments as well, though that amendment doesn't actually specify anything in particular. ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.")

It is frequently argued that some act of the government violates the free speech rights of foreigners living abroad, which is to say that whatever it was the government did fell into the class of behaviors prohibited by the first amendment. People tend to find that argument weird; I don't know what its batting average is.

Summing up, nothing extends rights to foreigners, but since the first amendment is a prohibition on the government rather than a grant of rights to certain protected people, foreigners arguably enjoy equal protection.

TL:DR: no, it doesn't even apply to US citizen, only to US government.

PS: "tyranny of the majority" for some is a definition fascism, i disagree, to me it isn't even proto-fascism, it lack a weird mythos about internal enemies and a few other mythos. It's closer bonapartism, or cesarism at worst. To be clear i think it is a precondition to have fascism (I.E as long as your case law/consitution is enforced for everybody the same way, you aren't a fascist state).

Yes, it's being suppressed. Criminalization is just one of the many coercive ways to censor something, but states have many tools in the box...

s/criminalized/supressed/ and message still holds true. You can still say the exact same things on a different forum.

Yes, the government censoring Tiktok's source code on Github would be a freedom of speech violation, but that's not what this is about, is it? See also: Tornado Cash. Publishing code facilitating money laundering is fine (you'll find the code still on Github!); running said code to facilitate money laundering isn't.

Or to go with an even more extreme example: Writing code for a self-aiming and firing gun is speech [1], running said code on a gun in your driveway isn't.

The fact that we are still debating such basics of the First Amendment here is baffling. This is almost as trivial as the other well-known limitations in my view (shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater etc.)

[1] At least at the moment, and as far as I know; I think we might see this type of speech being restricted in the same way that some facts about the construction of nuclear weapons are "innate state secrets".

American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans. That seems like the real 1st amendment issue to me and I was quite surprised to learn that ByteDance only claimed that their own 1st amendment rights were being infringed on (which personally I find to be flimsier).

EDIT: Tornado cash was taken down from GitHub though, so you don't have a point here

> American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans.

Yes, in the same way that American companies and individuals are routinely prohibited by the government from distributing other binaries to Americans, most notably anything that circumvents DRMs as regulated by the DMCA.

I really don't think the people that drafted the First Amendment had apps in mind when they thought of "speech", and would probably consider them something more like machinery (a printing press, a radio (not a radio station!) etc.) Interpreting Tiktok as a type of newspaper (which are widely protected even in democracies without an equivalent to the First Amendment) is much less of a leap of faith compared to considering an iOS executable speech.

So I would also argue that restricting DRM bypassing software is a violation of the 1st amendment and, more importantly, that it's a bad thing to restrict.

We'll never know what they would have thought, but I'll add that actual plans for machinery are definitely speech. We certainly do restrict these plans, with ITAR most notably, and I think it's reasonable to draw that line somewhere.

Note that I never said banning TikTok was as bad idea, just that it restricted speech by way of limiting distribution (which oddly looks unconsidered in the supreme court case), which it absolutely does. I'm uncomfortable with this level of power being granted to the government, but given that TikTok is obviously a spying/malware delivery tool by a foreign borderline hostile government I think it's probably warranted.

I think not being somewhat disturbed by the United States government restricting distribution of an application is a bit weird TBH. That's a huge power to have and can definitely be abused, especially if it's made easier to do so in the future.

Or does it just apply to the brainrotting addiction machine that shoves 800 videos a minute at teenagers?

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#t...

The only presidential administration that produced a non-deficit budget was Bill Clinton's second term (~97-00).

Probably because Ross Perot mostly self-funded a third party campaign centered around the national debt and had received 8% of the vote (and 19% in the previous election).

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

People quote it in the wrong context.

I personally picked 40% because I couldn't image a change of this sort being consistent with today's political reality.

That said, the fine print of that prediction can be interpreted that the ban is "in effect" even if it not enforced and has no legal liability. I doubt all the predictors were hanging their hat on that fine print when they predicted, though.

I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.

But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.

Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend?

Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?

The elite have always known the value of media and propaganda. TikTok could easily sway electorate decision making in the same way as Meta, X, and YouTube. The US oligarchs have no control over a sizable social media platform. The data security and privacy concerns are theater. The very same logic we use for TikTok applies to our own apps and social media. The only distinction is the false premise they have our interests in mind.

Are congressmen this incompetent? Yes. Are they bought by adversaries? Yes. Are they just humans who are as equally manipulated as you? Yes.

Did Trump get more money? Yes. Plan success.

Because, and I hate to say it, they're our snooping government agencies. I'd rather it be them that have access to all my data than the CCP apparatus.

Foreign governments not so much.

The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.

If person A says "X implies Y", then person B points out that X would also imply obvious nonsense Z, it doesn't mean that B is saying Y and Z are the same, or even that Y isn't true. They're just pointing out that X is too general to possibly be true.

This essential liberty was freedom from being killed. Pretty fucking essential.

We give up that right in exchange for the permanent safety that a government is supposed to grant. Life is presumably more fundamental than money, but if it's the only truly essential liberty, there is a lot of room to give up others.

Homeowners have some power. But if the government really needs to (modern example includes building a new railway), They can elect to forcibly pay you and seize it (eminent domain).

>We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.

Auto transportation was never a right to begin with. As inconvenient as it is, you are free to walk wherever you want without trespassing. Even across a road. But there's a line when you start to simply endanger others by say, walking on a road at 5 mph.

You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.

You sure about that one? (https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...)

Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content, and implicitly the fact that if a Chinese company owns it, the US has no control over it. Opinion making in the US is always implicitly enforced, not explicitly.

There's a great bit of an old interview with Noam Chomsky talking to an American reporter in which the reporter asks Chomsky: "You think I'm lying to you, pushing a US agenda?" and he responds: "No I think you're perfectly honest, but if you held any other beliefs than you do you wouldn't be sitting in that chair talking to me"

this is the platform version of that concept.

Please address the actual argument, namely that in the US, when you hand platforms to people like Zuckerberg, you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration the way other people change T-Shirts. That is the point of the sale, anybody who is not utterly gullible can see it from a mile away.

On a Chinese owned TikTok Americans get information presented to them, whether intentionally or authentically, that the US powers that be do not like. There is no other security argument, data was already managed by Oracle in the US, the app was technically separated from its Chinese equivalent Douyin.

The only one I wouldn't uniformly answer "no" to is the last one as there's no real evidence for the first two and that one is at least in principle possible but what's important is that private American citizens running entertainment apps on their personal phones isn't a "national security issue".

Running TikTok on government phones in Langley probably is so banning an app like this from government devices is fair enough, but the interest of any individual American is that they have free access to services, domestic or foreign, even if it's literal propaganda because they're the ones who are supposed to make that judgement. Hell even if it's Red Star OS from North Korea and they want to run it on their personal computer, they should be able to.

American interest isn't a synonym for interest of the state department, because if that's the case you're living in a security state (ironically like China) and not a free country.

> Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content

Perhaps I should have quoted it so that it was clear.

The TikTok ban would've been far less problematic if they had created legislation for all companies that curtailed data trading and increased user privacy. But that was never the goal.

1. Banning media based on alleged (or real) foreign interference is a very thin line

2. Banning and "unbanning" media based on vague accusations can be exploited for self-serving economical or political interests, which long-term hurts any kind of credibility of media as a whole. And, like it or not: we depend on media. We're not living in self-sufficient communes, at least most of us don't.

3. What made TikTok an issue in the first place: foreign interference (see 1) and problematic content, the policy causes for this probably include insufficient moderation and lack of court accountability. Then there's the question of algorithmic bias: I think this is not a simple question, e.g. is Instagram Reels technically the same or if not, what are the most important differences between their recommendation algorithms?

censorship, and similar constraints on free speech, just hide the problems of society so you are unable to act on possible threats as a policymaker.

He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.

Yep