Comment by imgabe
12 days ago
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?
> Nobody’s speech is restricted in any way.
Justice Sotomayor disagrees with you [1]:
> 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.
[1]: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/01/supreme-court-upholds-tik...
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.
You realize you’re expressing yourself without having to be on camera right now, right? That is in no way unique to TikTok.
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.
What is the burden? You have to tap on a different icon on your phone? Oh no
> What specific speech do you think is no longer allowed?
The TikTok ban was specifically prompted by Congresspeople being upset about pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli speech on the platform.