Forget about reading articles even... the supreme court decision itself is not long, is written in understandable language, and breaks down point by point the things that they had to consider, why they had to consider them, and the outcome of that consideration.
I think the easiest answer to follow for "why is this not prevented by free speech protection" is "the fact that petitioners “cannot avoid or mitigate” the effects of the Act by altering their speech." (page 10 of this ruling, but is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_In...)
It's amazing to me how many people are derailed by the free speech argument.
This is about who controls the network, not the content on the network.
There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations. That's why Murdoch became a US citizen (allowing him to buy Fox). This is in a similar vein.
If you followed the politics of the TikTok ban, it was absolutely about the content of the network.
US Congresspeople and Senators were angry that TikTok would not censor or de-emphasize pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli content, whereas Facebook much more actively de-boosted that kind of content. All previous attempts to ban TikTok failed to gain traction, until the Gaza war began, and that issue convinced many politicians in the US to back a ban.
I know this was a common talking point but I don't really agree it is a valid reason. It's probably just demographic and algorithmic differences that pro-Palestine content is more common on TikTok.
What would be interesting though - on all platforms, what's the organic percentage of the different view points, and whats the percentage that ends up being shown to people. I think that's what people are worried about being quietly manipulated. So even a small amount of people with some extreme view point would get promoted because China wants it, but since it's real content, it's not really obvious that it's being pushed.
I'm totally pro-TikTok btw I just don't really buy the idea that it was about this specific content.
right you really have to be not paying attention or be living in an alternative facts world. For instance look on X, there are literally thousands of paid for foreign propaganda bots trying to inject hatred and division in the USA and they have free reign and the government is not trying to stop them after Musk told them "no". Soon it starts happening to facebook, except there is no "paid" bluecheck account, the result will be the same. TikTok is a clear and present attempt by a centralized foreign advesary to do the same thing, but they will be treated differently because it's the enemy from without and not owned by an American company.
> There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations.
The communications act did not ban already-existing networks, and it did not ban specific providers. The tiktok ban is targeted specifically against one social media that the government does not like[1], with a thin veneer of "security concern" that people might specifically choose to share their contact list and that one of those contacts may be in a sensitive position.
[1] I don't even really think it's about the government not liking it! They thought they could get cheap support by drumming up anti-chinese sentiment and they ran with it. It's the most pathetic kind of politicking.
Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
> Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply.
The Constitution does not place limits on which people are protected by it (you don't have to be a citizen for it to apply as the founders were looking to limit the powers of their government not their citizens). And with the expansion of those protections to corporations through Citizens United, I'd be surprised if a court found that `company + foreign != person + foreign` when they've decided `company == person`. (Well not surprised by this Court.)
> The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
The rest of your comment still stands right in my eyes. National Security has often been used as a means to bypass many things enshrined by the Constitution.
Eh? Unless otherwise specified, corporations satisfy the definition of a person across all federal laws per 1 USC §1, which reads: "the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals"
That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.
Totally beside the point. Verbatim from Citizens United:
> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
That is not nearly the same thing as saying that they are people. Just that when it comes to this particular right, the way it is applied is not functionally different. That’s like saying that because corporations pay taxes they are also people.
The point you and others try to make is that corporations are people as a result of CU and so other human rights apply to them. This is backwards. SCOTUS and lower courts basically established that free speech applies to corporations same as individuals. But it did not establish their personhood. This is exactly equivalent to saying that a corporation has to pay taxes like a person. It does not make it a person.
So what people get wrong is they say “if a corporation is a person then it gets to do X”. Thats incorrect, nobody except talking heads on TV called it a person. Similarly “if a corporation has the right to free speech it has the right to do X” is incorrect. Having one right does not confer all rights. Again think of it as the idea of corporations get to pay taxes. People get to pay taxes. This did not make corporations people and did not confer any other rights onto corporations.
Ugh. CU doesn’t state that corporations are people. They can’t vote or own guns or get married or divorced. They can’t be legal guardians to children or pay income tax. They aren’t entitled to Social Security benefits and their coverage for health insurance may be denied for preexisting conditions. What CU said is that collectively people can use company resources to exercise their right to free speech and established the concept of super PACs.
This isn’t to say that it was the right decision (certainly seems to have done some very bad things). But “corporations are people” is a lay person talking point, not an actual legal doctrine. Therefore you can’t just apply it to other cases because there is nothing to apply.
You are correct that free speech isn’t limited by your citizenship status.
Isn’t Alphabet and other tech companies technically Irish owned? Doesn’t Saudi Arabia own a chunk of Twitter? Seemed like the whole ownership ship justification is a cheap canard.
Sure but even the supreme court disagrees with the supreme court. Treating their rulings as the best or canonical interpretation of a case doesn't make much sense.
It's not like any interpretation is valid but there are plenty of valid ones.
By definition, the Supreme Court's decision _is_ the canonical interpretation. Whether you disagree with the decision has no bearing on the matter.
And of course it makes sense, because the legal system was created by the very laws it upholds. If you think it should be different, then you'll have to convince a lot of people to change a lot of laws and probably parts of the US constitution
This is not affecting US citizens' legal free speech rights. You have the right to say what you want; you don't have the right to say it on a specific platform. You had free speech without TikTok before it existed, and you'll have the same amount of free speech if it does not exist again.
This is exactly the simplistic framing the person you replied to is talking about. So let's take an absurd extreme. The government designates a 1x1 mile "free speech zone" in the middle of Wyoming and says you're not allowed to speak anywhere else. You have the same amount of free speech as you did before, right?
Another extreme, let's say the government declared that you may speak freely but only by filling out a web form routed to Dave. Great guy. I mean they haven't technically taken away your right to speak? And someone will hear what you say.
Both of these would he flagrant violations of 1A as I'm sure you'd agree. But what this means is that implicit to 1A the government has limits on how many places it can deny you speech and limits on how much they can deny you an audience. And you can't hide behind the "well it's just divestiture not a ban" because the courts aren't blind to POSIWID.
So the more nuanced question is does banning TikTok meaningfully affect the ability of Americans to speak. And I think because of how large they are you could answer yes to this question. Americans know exactly what they're signing up for with their TT accounts and want to post there. TikTok but owned by an American would be legal so the platform itself isn't the issue. And saying TT can't operate in the US and actively preventing Americans from accessing it are two very different actions.
>Another extreme, let's say the government declared that you may speak freely but only by filling out a web form routed to Dave. Great guy. I mean they haven't technically taken away your right to speak? And someone will hear what you say.
This argument touches on the more valid defense for TikTok: restricting which people can host speech is a good way to restrict content, by punishing those who tend who host certain kinds of content. Personally, I'm okay with requiring a US company control TikTok in the US for national security reasons, but I would've preferred the law go through strict scrutiny. Laws can restrict what would usually be Constitutionally protected rights as long as they have good reasons and little room for collateral damage. If what Congress has been claiming is true, this law should pass that standard.
Actually, both of those examples might be legal (assuming the form is applying for a permit for some specific event/location). Time, place, and manner restrictions have long been upheld by the courts. What isn’t legal, or at least what requires strict scrutiny, are content restrictions.
Cool, so is all US companies in all other countries around the world then, no protections. All countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!
I get this argument, and obviously it's not stopping people from uploading the same content other places. But isn't there (or shouldn't there be) something about not banning what people can consume? Like could the US ban aljazeera? Or banning foreign books?! And still TikTok is different, because it's about the potential for quietly manipulating or curating what is seen, even if that content is produced domestically... And even if people can use other apps, there's still a community and subcultures that are being dismantled.
There is limitation of foreign control of all foreign companies in all countries. USA companies can stay in the world markets if it sells itself to owners of that country. All USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them, can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies.
There are no issues of speech. Nobody’s speech is restricted in any way. China simply isn’t allowed to sell a social media app in the US. This is just an import control like if we decided not to import lemons from Brazil or anything else.
What specific speech do you think is no longer allowed?
> Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a brief opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. She stressed that she saw “no reason to assume without deciding that the Act implicates the First Amendment because our precedent leaves no doubt that it does.”
The rest of the justices sidestepped the question by assuming the First Amendment was implicated for the sake of argument.
They upheld the ban even if there were a First Amendment interest. That doesn’t mean that there is one, it means that if there were one it wouldn’t matter. They didn’t examine if the first amendment applied or not because it wouldn’t matter.
The freedom to speak without having to be on camera. TikTok made it so millions of people could express themselves with filters and AI voices without having to be on camera. Or could dance along with a crowd asynchronously. There are so many more class of expression that if they were known people would advocate for their protection. To transplant a species to a new environment is to modify an ecosystem. At scale, it means silencing at least 15% of population with no credible alternative, no apparent migration path.
Limits on how you can speak are absolutely limits on speech. It's called burdening. The government must demonstrate a reason to burden a right. It is held to various levels of scrutiny depending on the ways it is burdening.
I think it is very obvious why removing the most-used social media from 170 million americans would be burdensome. SCOTUS disagrees.
Interesting that the reference linked is in reference to must-carry regulation. The tiktok scenario is the opposite though? Must-not-carry that content! I suppose Uncle Sam's sword cuts both ways.
Also, more directly for those in the back, the actual first amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The first amendment doesn't guarantee the speaker a venue for their speech. You're still free to say whatever you want to say, so long as it doesn't cross any other laws, in or on whatever other private venues or town squares you so choose.
To turn your question around, rather than spending time defending TikTok I wish people would spend time thinking about the need for actual privacy laws. The kind of laws that outline data governance and the extents to which an individual can expect their individual privacy to be respected. Maybe then we can play less whack a mole with invasive and potentially harmful social software.
Sweet summer child, do you think TikTok would've been banned if it didn't come into focus as a hotbed for pro-Palestinian content?
"The issue in the United States for support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly odd. And so we really have a TikTok problem."
Something very appalling has just taken place in the USA. Old people have muzzled the free speech of young people. Americans spend more hours on TikTok than on television (but it mostly skews to young people), and now it's been taken away.
If TikTok were sold to an American company, as the new law demands, why would that change anything about the amount of pro-Palestinian content? Just because the ADL said they don't like TikTok does not mean that's the motivation for the bill. You're still allowed to criticize Israel as much as you were a decade ago (which is to say, less than you're allowed to criticize the US, for some reason ;) but still).
Because a sale is and has always been impossible since it would be an unacceptable embarrassment for China in the current climate. The divestiture is just a way to make the ban pass muster.
Thats a good reason why it's banned. China cannot sell. TikTok is under the strong control of their government, and so won't sell despite loosing an stupefying amount of revenue by doing so.
X may be the one exception, though I note that the "advertiser boycott" was ended when Musk made trips to Israel, was photographed next Netanyahu's atrocity propaganda prop pieces, next to Ben Shapiro, etc.
Musk first posted an antisemitic tweet, which caused a minor scandal. Then, to atone for that, he traveled to Israel, met with Netanyahu, and had Twitter begin boosting pro-Israeli content.
Musk went from antisemite to Israel fan in the course of just a few days. This actually isn't so surprising, though. There are many people who are both antisemitic and pro-Israel (see basically every far-right party in Europe, for example).
TikTok was specifically banned because of one main reason. When it was being discussed in congress, they told their users to complain to their congresspeople, and posted their congresspersons number. Then when a bunch of unhinged teens called threatening to kill themselves, congress members rightfully went "What the fuck" and the bill gained enormous support
Tik tok was banned because it tried to use children to start a political movement. Unfortunately for them children can not vote so the movement did nothing other than scare adults.
When the law is directed at a publisher, the 1st amendment is likely at issue. Especially if that law is singling out one publisher and not applying to any other entity, as this one is.
The case law around editorial control is at odds with most platforms' section 230 protection, which makes the fact that TikTok argued that its algorithm _is_ speech pretty different from how most platforms have argued to date (in order to preserve their section 230 protections)
Returning control to the caller only really needs to be explicit if you're doing it in an arbitrary spot in the middle of the function because if you're at the end there's nothing to do _other than_ return control. For instance in other languages you don't need to explicitly say "go to the next iteration" at the end of a for loop, and if you want to do it before the end of the loop body you can `continue`. If "flow control should always be explicit", then should we be writing `continue` at the end of our loop blocks?
I think the other part of it is that it is just part of a cohesive language design where everything is an expression, including things like if's, matches, etc that would be control flow statements in other languages.. It would be a little weird to say that functions are the only thing that have different semantics.
I think the idea is that there are many factors that might motivate somebody's decision that their life is not worth living any longer. Each individual will have a different threshold for that, but if there are institutions that can alleviate the reasons for the people on the fringe, then there will be net fewer people that choose death when they otherwise may have.
Someone with advanced dementia may be too far from that threshold to change the decision for them, but that doesn't mean that better institutions wouldn't move the needle.
Like others are saying, this just looks like a rebrand. Hopefully this competes in performance with the 2019 Nvidia Shield TV Pro which is to date still the only streamer that performs well enough for high quality audio and video, but is starting to age (and no longer works with things like google home audio groups). If anyone knows of a comparable plex streamer let me know :)
The mistake here is thinking that cost and price are related beyond determining what the final margin is.
The consumer decides the price that is acceptable for the good - the cost of that good being higher or lower just changes the viability of the product and the bottom line from selling it. So it makes tons of sense that given two similar products that consumers will pay a similar price for that companies would prefer to sell the one that costs them less.
After a recent mention on HN I gave Kagi a try and subscribed for a few months. But after using it I'm really not sure why it get so much for the core "search", I found it so underwhelming that I would instinctively use the !g bang to just go right to Google.
It turns out that even though I can't stand the number of ads, Google is still much better at getting me an answer quickly (usually with the quick answer modules).
I was also surprised at the number of times Kagi came up with 0 search results, and while one of the draws for me was to have higher quality results instead of quantity, I still found a _ton_ of results for AI generated crappy top-10-list sites trying to sell me something.
Love the idea, and will probably check back in from time to time, but so far the execution just isn't there for me.
Really depends on "how many people". Also if its roughly the same group of people they're making angry over and over, and they don't see an impact to the bottom line, then I'd say the answer is "pretty small", at least relative to Google's size (at which its all about volume)
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