Comment by yobid20
11 hours ago
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.
The court has never determined that corporations are people, that’s a completely unfounded meme.
What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.
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.
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.
The EFF disagrees.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...
The Supreme Court doesn't.
The supreme court says a lot of things.
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Just because Supreme court said it doesn't mean they aren't heavily biased.
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> The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security).
This is red alert talk. We need to make damned sure we know exactly what we're asking for here and that we're not giving up more than we mean to.
This is affecting the free speech rights of US citizens directly. You might wish it was as simple as you try to portray it, but it clearly isn’t
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.
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Only in the same way that you not letting me into your living room affects my free speech inside of your living room, I think.