> Please explain how my free speech is taken away by a TikTok ban.
The government prevents you from communicating with TikTok.
“Banning TikTok would violate the First Amendment. The government can’t impose this type of total ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious, immediate harm to national security. There’s no public evidence of that type of harm, and a ban would not be the only option for addressing that harm if it did exist,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.
Personally, I tend to let the ACLU guide my opinion in these cases, as they are the experts here.
> Depending on the day, HN is convinced that
Let's do this.
> free speech is an obligation of private companies to their customers
The use is common parlance here. In this case, the idea is the company allows it's users to speak relatively freely (within the limits of what their T&C say). The companies generally push toward some level of preferring to allow speech rather than blocking it entirely.
Your average HN person here understands we aren't literally talking about the 1st Amendment in this case.
> free speech is an obligation of the government to companies
In this case, the government can't limit a company's speech. This has been upheld numerous times in the courts. The government can't require a company or people at the company to say something, except in special circumstances.
> It is neither.
It's interesting you take a literal approach to this in a post where you say this: "HN is convinced."
HN is simply two letters. The two letters are convinced of nothing. They are letters and cannot be convinced.
If by HN, you mean Hacker News, this website, then again, the website itself does not think. It cannot be convinced of anything. It's code that returns content.
If you mean people here on HN, the community, then your comment proves your statement is incomplete and, therefore, misleading. It is not just one of two options.
Basically, if you don't understand the context of the use of "free speech" in normal every day conversation and instead want it to be taken one way and one way only, you should really check your comments themselves for the use of colloquialisms so you don't do the same thing.