Comment by jmholla
12 days ago
> 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.
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.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.
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.
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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.