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Comment by Cheer2171 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the US has maybe a short-term self-interest in banning TikTok if the Chinese started to do this. But it violates the first amendment and the rights of US citizens to access speech from the rest of the world. That is very bad in the long run. The US didn't ban Mein Kampf during World War II.

In fact, I think the biggest threat to the US is the suspension of the first amendment because of the age old boogeyman of national security. Propaganda has always existed. The way to respond to bad speech is more speech. Banning it makes it forbidden and thus captivating, don't you know about the Streisand Effect?

If the transmission of media is a threat to national sovereignty, if the fate of the country can be undermined with memes, then we have already lost. The US should disconnect itself from the global internet.

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I can't see why depriving a foreign corporation of access to the US market is a free speech issue.

Using a freedom of information argument for Americans is a stronger position, but that isn't guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

This is going further than I want to go from a civil rights perspective, but there is at least some precedent. Corporate sanctions and bans have been used very effectively, as Huawei experienced not so long ago.

I just don't think the government should be in the business of deciding on behalf of its citizens what media sources they are allowed to read. On that path lies danger.

I'm not a fan of corporate personhood, but so long as it remains a thing - it's relevant. Corporations have the same rights as individuals in the US. And any entity legally within the country, foreign or native, has 1st Amendment protections. And this company is clearly being targeted by the government for what they are saying, promoting, or allowing to be said - all of which would fall under 1st Amendment protections. If this passes, there's a real chance this will end up being yet another 9-0 'no this obviously is not constitutional you clowns' ruling in the Supreme Court.

The US had a censorship operation in WW2, the Nazis or the Empire of Japan didn't get to operate radio stations in the US during the war, and in the cold war the USSR didn't get TV and radio stations in the US either.

In what conflict was giving an adversary a full attack surface for propanda etc. deemed the right approach?

This is like the government telling Radio Shack and RCA that all shortwave radios sold must be programmed to tune out the frequencies of Japanese or USSR stations. Or that it is illegal to tune a shortwave radio to a Japanese station.

The US had more a massive propaganda effort of their own during WWII, but yes we literally rounded up every person of Japanese descent and put them in camps, which should never happen again. Yes, there was a lot of really terrible censorship later in the Cold War like McCarthyism, which is the danger I am worried about. The public became so xenophobic that you could kill an actor's career in Hollywood by telling an agent that they had a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Simply having copies of books written by authors from the wrong country automatically made you "unamerican" and a traitor.

This is the path I fear we are going down again. The government is saying it knows best about what media we cannot be trusted to consume.

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