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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

What happened to freedom of speech. I thought many politician, especially republicans cry for free speech.

I think there’s some concern over manipulation of content and surveillance of users by a foreign adversary.

The Wall Street Journal recently published this article that I think shines a light on some major areas of concern.

“TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness: Self-harm, sad-posting and disordered-eating videos abound on the popular app” [0]

— [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-feeds-teens-a-diet-of-da...

There was a whole genre of news reports about YouTube radicalizing people, but I don’t recall people even really talking about banning it

I read news like this for Instagram etc.. but it doesn't seem to be banned.

I don't think freedom of speech applies to foreign companies.

Freedom of speech is recognized as a universal human right throughout the world, and American political philosophy considers many rights mentioned in the Constitution as applying universally as well.

What are you talking about? Tons of European countries have zero concept of freedom of speech.

For those that don't believe me, go try to have a discussion as skeptic of accuracy of Jewish deaths during WW2. I'm not saying they're right, but there are several things you can flat out go to jail for in the several countries just for talking about.

I'm assuming your definition of free speech is the absolute variety. If so, no country, including the United States, has ever recognized freedom of speech as having no limits, making it a useless definition in the context of this conversation. There are always limits, everywhere.

But it's obvious that European countries have a concept of freedom of speech, just one you personally don't consider valid. But like the guy said, that's just, like, your opinion, man. That concept is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, as well as the EU Charter, and probably whatever individual constitutions or bodies of law each country has. It was established before the US came up with the First Amendment, which was based on existing Enlightenment philosophy.

It’s easy to argue this is restricting free speech for the American based users.

What does free speech have to do with this?

Tik tok videos are speech, therefore banning tiktok is a violation of free speech

A bit of silly analogy but if a megaphone recorded everything about the person speaking into it and forwarded it to a semi-adversarial state, would banning that megaphone be a violation of freespeech?

Haven't read the bill, but I'll go on a limb and say it's not written to apply to all apps owned by semi-adversarial states.

Of course, it's a hypothetical to tease out why people think it's a violation of free speech.

A law this specific wouldn't even be valid I'm my country.

It is substantially the same as the one passed in my state. The first sentence of senate bill 419:

> AN ACT BANNING TIKTOK IN MONTANA; PROHIBITING A MOBILE APPLICATION STORE FROM OFFERING THE TIKTOK APPLICATION TO MONTANA USERS

https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billpdf/SB0419.pdf

You are free to post the exact same content on any other platform. It's not the speech that's banned, it's the platform.

Freedom of speech includes the right to receive information. [1] There's tons of content on Tik Tok that isn't available elsewhere.

[1] https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1549/right-to-r...

freedom of speech for republicans.

They only "care" about it when it affects "conservatives". Anything that the "left wing" uses (or cares about) must be banned.

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