I’m not arguing it’s a restriction on TikTok’s speech or bytedance’s speech.
It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law doesn’t fine TikTok. The law fines the people who let me download an application I’ve chosen to use. At $5,000 per instance.
It’s not about TikTok’s rights being violated. It’s about mine, and yours.
No court in the land will agree with your interpretation. The first amendment protects speech, but it doesn't grant you the right to publish that speech wherever you want. If it did then Facebook couldn't ban people from its platform, for example.
The Supreme Court with its unanimous decision made it very very clear it’s not about freedom of speech, but about foreign adversary having access to data profile of 180 million US citizens. And believe in lawmakers argument of foreign adversary propaganda to those citizens.
Why do people on hacker news keep drudging up freedom of speech ad nauseum??
I wouldn't be surprised if the freedom of speech nonsense is an influence campaign by the PLA.
It is just such a ridiculous argument but if you repeat nonsense enough times, people start repeating it back as if it is real.
We never had to deal with this before because the WW2 generation was obviously not stupid enough to let the KGB publish children's books and Saturday morning cartoons inside the US and have a KGB influence campaign that says to ban the books/cartoons would be a free speech issue.
Obviously a non-starter. What you see with Tiktok is how completely infiltrated and corrupted things are in the US in 2025.
The unrestricted war from China started a long time ago and the IMO the US has already lost.
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
― Sun Tzu
It's really about how the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov and stock market regulation, by a company that doesn't have to instantly respond to pressure from the Executive branch, could possibly refuse to instantly comply from pressure from US intelligence agencies, could refuse to comply with search requests from US law enforcement, and extensive lobbying from Facebook to cripple a competitor that Facebook ignored until it was too late.
It's not a free speech issue.
Given that the infra for serving US tiktok customers is in the United States(inside of Oracle Cloud), I am curious if Tiktok/bytedance responds to US law enforcement requests.
> the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov
You have it backwards. The US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is 100 percent beholden to the Chinese gov.
Did you read the opinion? It did its analysis as requiring some level of scrutiny because of the free speech implications under intermediate (and in Sofomayor’s concurrence strict) scrutiny. It held the national security concern outweighed the free speech concern but it absolutely did not say it was relevant in the analysis.
“ At the same time, a law targeting a foreign adversary’s control over a communications platform is in many ways different in kind from the regulations of non-expressive activity that we have subjected to First Amendment scrutiny”
And the opinion talks about foreign adversary, those exact words, at least 30 times. It mentioned freedom of speech twice
Show me where it is an infringement of your 1st amendment right to a private platform? You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours. There are plenty of other communication channels you can use to express yourself. Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok, just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
> You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours.
So if I wanted to hold a speech how corrupt the government is and then the government passed a law that a PA supplier isn't allowed to sell me a Microphone or speakers, that wouldn't infringe my first amendment right because I don't have a right to a microphone or a stage? (Im not American so I don't have any first amendment rights anyways but for arguments sake.)
It's the PA supplier would be in a better position to argue that their rights are being violated. Especially if a single customer was targeted because of their political views / protected characteristics etc.
The problem with the TikTok scenario is that no specific group is being targeted for restraint. And the government does have the right to regulate trade. E.g. there are embargoed countries, export controls, etc. The fact that you can't sell raw milk across state lines is different from a hypothetical restriction on selling raw milk to, say, people named Todd.
No, it wouldn’t. Congress could pass a law that we’re not going to import microphones and speakers from China. The Constitution explicitly gives them the power to do that. You could then purchase them from any one of a number of other companies and your speech is unaffected.
Look, my point is that the first amendment is in play here and it’s not ridiculous to suggest a free speech analysis is required to hold the law as constitutional or not, which is what the court did and what reasonable people can agree or disagree around to what extent that speech should or shouldn’t be protected. (I personally think, as I stated that the free speech harm is a stronger case from the users who have now been restrained in their ability to use the platform and software distributors who are now restrained from distributing specific software than it is as applied to TikTok where the legislation is content neutral and so the free speech analysis is less relevant.) I’m not even claiming that this law should be found unconstitutional, just that there are free speech issues to adjudicate and the less obvious ones are probably more relevant than the one people are citing where the restraint is content neutral.
Your comment however draws a weird parallel later on though but first let’s take a moment here:
> Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok
That is what the court found but it opens some interesting questions that really do have impacts.
I would bet that you would find a law that says op-eds can only be published in an approved list of venues to be clearly wrong, yet it is equally just determining venue and not content.
As would a law which banned foreign ownership of venues while also introducing a regulatory scheme for domestic ownership stakes of sensitive industries and defined news and commentary as a nationally security sensitive industry. (Which this law essentially does for certain types of apps.)
So at some point a law can be “content neutral” and about access to venue not content but I bet almost any reasonable person would agree it’s an unreasonable restraint.
Now for a situation you draw the above as a parallel with but is very different:
> just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
Bluesky can do whatever they want but if the government were to get involved in defining regulations around which users could use BlueSky… yes absolutely I would expect it to be thrown out on first amendment grounds and expect it’s a significantly stronger case than any of the examples above.
It’s a much weaker and almost irrelevant case when directed at a non-governmental organization in which some folks are using “free speech” as an argument over what entities which are not enjoined from almost any actions may do with their own venues. But yeah, if it was the government telling BlueSky who to ban? You bet that’s got first amendment implications and I’d expect a court to review it under strict scrutiny. (And I wouldn’t expect it to survive.)
> I would bet that you would find a law that says op-eds can only be published in an approved list of venues to be clearly wrong, yet it is equally just determining venue and not content.
That's a poor analogy, because allowlists and blocklists are not the same thing and do not have the same effects. The government only allowing a list of certain approved media outlets would be an obvious 1A infringement. The government blocking certain media outlets is not.
It’s not meant to say they’re the same thing, it’s meant to demonstrate clearly that venue restrictions even when content neutral can impose restrictions on speech and those restrictions must be balanced and scrutinized appropriately under our system.
I think that’s a huge difference, yes. And about what apps my phone is able to download, and what servers it is able to access.
Another huge difference is broadcasting is about usage of a shared resource and has always had regulations on who is allowed to do what. They don’t ban RT from setting up their own venue or printing a newspaper. RT and other outlets are able to operate in the US and people are able to chose to watch them.
Graffiti laws are also evaluated under heightened scrutiny due to free speech implications. A law having an impact on free speech does not mean it never holds, but it must be analyzed in that context. Here’s an example: https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
> Graffiti laws are also evaluated under heightened scrutiny due to free speech implications
Graffiti bans are unquestionably constitutional. Graffiti laws that regulate the content are not.
Telling people where they can speak is precedented, legal and necessary. Telling people what they can say is against the principles of free speech; the government doing so is illegal.
I get that you believe that's what's happening, but I can't imagine any US court agreeing with you.
The law (and the US constitution) does not guarantee any particular platform for your speech. It just guarantees that you can speak, and courts have interpreted that to mean that you need to have some reasonable platform, and that laws can't put an unreasonable burden on your ability to speak on some platform.
As an aside:
> Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law does not target internet providers at all. They are not required to block traffic to *.tiktok.com or any of their IP addresses.
> It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
You are being ridiculous now. None of those are forms of speech.
And restrictions on your ability to perform certain actions is literally what being in a society is about. If you don't like it then find another society. Just like you can find another ISP, place to publish your video or platform to use apps you want to use.
Whether you think it’s ridiculous or not, restrictions on distribution of software being a violation of US free speech rights has been an established part of US case law for around three decades now: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
I'm skeptical that Bernstein vs DOJ would apply, to a [foreign-controlled] company that is not publishing their algorithm, on the idea that allowing their [trade-secret] code to control how hundreds of millions of people interact with each other is somehow free speech on ByteDance's part.
The foreign-controlled part in particular implicates Congress's obvious and explicit power to regulate international trade, and it seems obvious to me that there would be something less than strict scrutiny applied to alleged violations of the 1A when that Congressional power is in play.
Yes, most of the court felt intermediate scrutiny was the appropriate standard in part because of the reasons you outlined.
(I also agree that this is a different case, I only point to Bernstein because it is a clear part of case law which states that software distribution is and can be a free speech issue and restraints on it would be expected to be evaluated with some level of scrutiny.)
I also feel you are being a bit absurdist fwiw. I am know the be a principled devils advocate sometimes, so I'm reading you as that, otherwise your position as an American makes very little sense to me
The justices on the Supreme Court analyzed the constitutionality of this law under a free speech basis. The Per Curiam opinion of the court suggested the correct standard was intermediate scrutiny as an abridgment of free speech. Justice Sotomayor suggested in her concurrence that strict scrutiny (the highest standard) was appropriate.
They concluded that these regulations were okay at those levels of scrutiny, but it is not absurd or ridiculous to analyze these as forms of speech, and indeed, our courts do so.
That said, just because there is a conflict with freedom of speech doesn’t prevent all government regulation, it just means the laws involved must pass an elevated level of scrutiny. That applies here, for multiple reasons, and with multiple parties.
Source code you can argue is a form of speech versus a packaged product.
Not that the case is relevant because restrictions on the availability of products is well established under the law. I can’t just buy nuclear weapons for example.
>"If you don't like it then find another society. "
Isn't use of any non-violent means to advocate one's belief to change the society is the whole point of the democracy? Your point is rather very totalitarian.
I’m not, for what it’s worth. I’m arguing that I think the free speech case is stronger for the users and software distributors who are enjoined from the platform or distributing certain software applications than it is for the platform whose ownership but not content or speech is being directly regulated. (The law doesn’t fine TikTok it fines the people providing services to TikTok. Their speech rights may be more relevant in this case.)
I also see why people are interpreting my comment to mean that because it’s a restriction on my speech it’s not constitutional because that’s how people usually act on the Internet. But I don’t and didn’t. What I said was it was a restriction on my speech and I believe that’s more of interesting case than the restriction on TikTok’s speech. The ramification of that is that the courts would adjudicate the free speech restriction at an appropriate scrutiny level and determine whether that restriction is allowable. As we all know, some restrictions are allowable and constitutional. Others aren’t.
It’s not unreasonable, wild, or strange to point out that there’s a restriction on speech here, and to point out that conflict needed to be resolved to determine constitutionality.
Most are handled at the district level, if the court felt there was no legal issue at play, they would have denied cert. Their opinion did end up being per curiam which suggests the court feels clearly about the case, but does not suggest they never felt there was an issue worth arguing.
> What I said was it was a restriction on my speech
I don't agree that it is, though. The restriction is on where you cannot put your speech[0], not on the speech itself. If there was nowhere that you could put your speech (or if the available avenues became much much much smaller in reach), then I would say that your speech is being restricted.
But that's not the case here. You can publish that same speech on YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and a host of others where you can reach more or less the same audience you can reach on TikTok.
You also mention elsewhere about not being permitted to download a particular app onto your phone (and/or that a service provider isn't allowed to provide it to you). That just isn't a free-speech issue at all. And besides, if you have an Android phone, you absolutely still can install the TikTok app on the phone, because Android allows sideloading. If you have an iPhone and can't sideload, then your beef is with Apple, not with the US government. Beyond that, www.tiktok.com still works just fine, and will still work fine even if/when it ends up hosted on infra owned by non-US companies.
[0] Note that I did not say it is a restriction on where you can put your speech; it is a specific restriction on where you cannot, which I think is an important distinction.
It’s a restriction either way. Whether it’s a reasonable one or one that meets elevated scrutiny is a separate second question. Your points are arguing that question and are reasonable context for that debate.
The government isn’t banning TikTok, the law only requires a change in ownership. The current owners are choosing to performatively shut down in an attempt to bully their way through that requirement
The US need not restrict any of your speech. You’re not directly communicating with any of TikTok’s users when you post to it, TikTok is. In the Internet age, even apparent one-way communication is handshakes upon handshakes. Consider this: You’re free to send whatever messages you want to ByteDance. They’re just not allowed to reply (or have anyone reply on their behalf). The app is a useless binary blob if it can’t set up a TLS connection.
If a "moral stance" is one you only hold when it applies to other people's decisions, it's illegitimate and those stances have a name we give them: hypocrisy.
Also. Comparing support for MAID with defendant rights is a false equivalence. The correct equivalence there is whether or not someone still favors criminal rights if they were personally on trial. Not someone who personally becomes less magnanimous to criminals they are personally affected by. The equivalence the other direction would be asking loved ones about someone else's decision to undergo MAID, and asking them subset of folks around them who aren't ready to let them go yet how they feel about MAID. (Though in both cases of MAID and not wanting the wrong person to be thrown in jail for a criminal action as a victim, I suspect the drop in support is less than you think it is.)
> a "moral stance" is one you only hold when it applies to other people's decisions, it's illegitimate and those stances have a name we give them: hypocrisy
Hypocrisy doesn’t make the moral stance wrong, it just means humans are weak and sinful.
it's not as simple, but sometimes is - as anything in life. You might not be networked well (for whatever the reason) and then you have to cast a wide net or go through hiring agencies to pull in candidates.. it's still going to be an unknown group.
They’re not options, they’re grants of stock units which vest over time. A unit of stock is a share granted and vesting at its full price, not an option to buy stock at some price later.
While startups use options, most large public tech companies typically do not.
Sigh. Though there are definitely automated track laying machines in the US, some pieces might not meet the needs of the project and may want other machines. You can of course ship them.
Did you think CAHSR was going to lay the track by hand?
You can today in the Central Valley look at large construction sites and structures, some of which are finished. Go 100 miles up the alignment, and see construction and structures there too. None of those sites have laid track yet, but there’s hundred of miles of trackway under development.
It's understandable, and necessary, but it's also amusing that the CA HSR project has made (and opened) many miles of roads and bridges for cars and yet doesn't have any trains to run.
Of course, if they had started with a ten mile section of track in some place easy to drop in tracks then everyone'd make fun of it for only having two stations ten miles apart or something.
> If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.
I’m not sure Twitter is a good case study of CEOs being interchangable.
> If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground
Why was that again? That 80% of the engineering team, uhm, “walked”?
This is not CARB’s first rodeo so I’d be surprised if they weren’t figuring this out in the agreement. I’m not familiar with this agreement but I’d speculate something like: It sounds like the manufacturers are getting things they want too, which means that if they want to keep those concessions in place, they have to honor their side of the agreement, independent of whether a court says CARB could force a specific piece of their regulations. (I suppose if a court said CARB couldn’t enforce any regulation then the agreement would be moot, but if they leave anything intact then the manufacturers would presumably be best served by keeping up the deal.)
CARB’s history and track record working through bending the arc of the industry for this type of thing is pretty good, even without Mary Nichols at the helm.
(Another thing worth noting here is most car manufacturers have had a large preference towards consistency and stability in their regulatory agreements, so they often would prefer to sit down and plan a timeline for transitions that doesn’t keep changing around on them and their peers.)
And for the utterly ineffectual regulation of restaurant emissions. (Which, I think, are the dominant source of PM2.5 in a lot of places that get a lot of foot traffic in California.)
> The reason I had healthcare during grad school was because the union won it right before I joined.
I’m sorry if this is weird, but as someone who also went to UCSC for grad school I found this a bit confusing. So I looked it up and you started at UCSC at 2014, yeah?
UCSC grad students had GSHIP coverage for years before that time. I myself was on it when I joined starting in 2009, and there’s plenty of documentation of fights folks had over trying to get better rates and coverage on GSHIP well before both our times: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/05/13/18415831.php (Which personally I thought was pretty good especially after the expansion of airlift coverage which was an unfortunately common problem for UCSC’s location “over the hill” from many tier 1 emergency rooms.)
Maybe I missed something when I was there 2009-2015. But what did the union representation and bargaining bring to the table there?
From a couple years ago, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in anything close to a reasonable or even livable stipend for a researcher. It was bad when I was in grad school, but I was pretty appalled to hear during the wildcat strikes ten years later that despite the increase in costs there didn’t seem to be that much change in the stipend amounts for graduate researchers. The students who were wildcatting out of frustration seemed to have a pretty good reason IMO.
I think that meets a pretty similar pattern of unions focusing on fighting about healthcare while leaving wages to stagnate over years of price increases, which I guess also applies in many unrepresented UC roles and in dynamics elsewhere. I personally didn’t see much difference between UAW’s representation and not when I was there, but I guess I didn’t have a huge point of comparison.
I hope whatever this new swell of support is provides livable stipends for young researchers though. So I hope I’m either wrong or grad student unions are able to win more in bargaining in the future. :)
Nice to see a fellow slug! I think you are correct on the timeline being further back. The narrative I recalled was that there was a major victory around health care fee remission before I joined but it looks as if that was part of the original contract the union negotiated [1].
I spent my final years at UCSC working through the systems they had set up internally (administration meetings with GSA, getting on committees of administrators as a grad student voice, working with on campus housing developers[2]) in order to improve housing availability and cost. We had marginal wins if anything. The strike the next year won everyone thousands of dollars toward housing every year. I understand the nuance of it being a wildcat strike but the entire organizing infrastructure there was from the union.
I agree with your final points and hope stipends will follow upwards in the near future.
This has been a common problem as “tech” has increasingly grown into a field that’s departed from some of its roots, but the parallel for tech conferences isn’t in the engineering field, nor is it in a wildly random suggestion of fan conferences:
The comparison is the creative and artistic fields, which absolutely host events and all kinds of opportunities for practicing creatives to meet other practicing creatives and discuss their work.
That’s because programming isn’t an engineering exercise. It’s art. Which isn’t to say engineering practices don’t improve the practice of our art. Just ask a large sculpture artist how much engineering they have to do to put different types of metal in the air.
The fact that programming pays so well has led many to believe the nature of our field is fundamentally different than what it is. We are lucky enough to be passionate about one of the few artistic and creative fields that is extremely lucrative.
We should never lose sight of how fortunate we are.
It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law doesn’t fine TikTok. The law fines the people who let me download an application I’ve chosen to use. At $5,000 per instance.
It’s not about TikTok’s rights being violated. It’s about mine, and yours.