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Comment by serenadeineb | Hacker News Reader

Congress shall make no law respecting ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...

unless they mumble 'national security', and then screw the constitution ...

Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are very restricted.

It makes no sense to me how this is an argument of free speech.

I assume you are saying this is curtailing the creators speech? However the creators can move to any other platform, they are not being restricted in what they can say or produce.

So perhaps the concern is about TikTok's free speech; which, thank god the constitution does not protect a foreign adversaries right to free speech.

Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok contains lots of speech that US citizens have the right to hear.

I agree, though not when broadcast by a foreign adversary (per the 1934 law).

Forcing a sale to a US company also enables that to continue. Additionally, it does not protect the right for users to receive/hear speech from EVERY outlet, this same speech is permissible on any other platform - simply not one mediated by an adversary.

I'm very curious about this case, actually. My top questions

- difference between actually broadcast and potentially broadcast. Can the government suspend someone for potentially doing something?

- More on the right to hear speech -- you're saying that I cannot receive speech from foreign adversaries if I choose to do so myself? IMO this is well within my rights

- Do platform effects (e.g. recommendation) count as speech? For example, I may choose to post on TikTok bc it circulates in 24h to a specific audience - if TT got changed, does this mean that my speech got curtailed? (right to assemble, etc)

So just go hear it from somewhere else. There is no content on tiktok that can't be recorded and posted on instagram reels.

This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws explicitly support restrictions on your ability to hear the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do I have the right to hear:

* A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid

* Private conversations between you and your significant other

* DMs between other people on social media

* Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't have a membership

* Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I don't have an account

What does this have to do with anything? How do any of these examples relate to the tiktok ban in the slightest?

By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on instagram and X, correct?

Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat for me?

They’ve imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The government is okay with them restricting me from these public squares, outrageous!

Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the restriction on tik tok?

If these are truly public squares, it’s outrageous that I need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are we not mad about that as well?

Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban. It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of americans use because of intangible threats that are frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.

The government isn't banning you from most of these, the only ones they are banning you from is private ones, but TikTok has speech that is non-private, so it's completely different.

Not free speech. INHO its about free assembly. 140M of us assembled there, and now that meeting place is being distroyed, and we are being dispersed, without any actual harm being in evidence. If the government can do that here, it can do it anywhere.

Go try to assemble on the White House lawn without an invitation; I'm sure it will work very well for you.

That's how women earned the right to vote in this country...

Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something be distilled to a single concern.

It is a balancing act for sure, but is it 'right' to have all those choices, but only as long as they sufficiently support governing body overall worldview?

There are still a million places online people can organize and assemble so I don't really see how this right is being meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain every avenue of assembly to the point this is a constitutional issue.

THIS!

If you listen to the arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court, the court is extremely dubious of the free speech argument. And this has been a court that has been very favorable to free speech overall.

Its the fact that 140 million of us chose to assemble in this place ( app ) that IMHO should have weighed much higher as a concern, over speculative spoooky dangers. No actual harm to the country was shown, just supposition, which equates to us trusting the government when it strips out constitutional rights away.

Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.

I actually think that they do — tourists to the US have free speech protections. There are many foreign-owned press outlets operating in the US (Forbes, Al Jazeera, RT, CGTN etc.) that are also protected by the first amendment.

Doesn't matter, US citizens have the right to receive the speech on TikTok

The real answer is that no corporations should have free speech rights in and of themselves - by obtaining a government granted liability shield a corporation (/LLC) is not merely a group of individuals, but rather a highly scaled governmentesque entity running on its own subbureaucracy. That liability shield is an explicit government creation for specific public policy goals, and when the outcome is at odds with the individual freedom the arrangement can and should be modified.

Remember, money is speech (Citizens United v. FEC)!

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