Comment by coryfklein
4 days ago
This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws explicitly support restrictions on your ability to hear the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do I have the right to hear:
* A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid
* Private conversations between you and your significant other
* DMs between other people on social media
* Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't have a membership
* Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I don't have an account
The government isn't banning you from most of these, the only ones they are banning you from is private ones, but TikTok has speech that is non-private, so it's completely different.
What does this have to do with anything? How do any of these examples relate to the tiktok ban in the slightest?
By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on instagram and X, correct?
Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat for me?
They’ve imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The government is okay with them restricting me from these public squares, outrageous!
Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the restriction on tik tok?
If these are truly public squares, it’s outrageous that I need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are we not mad about that as well?
Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban. It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of americans use because of intangible threats that are frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.