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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

TikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.

The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.

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Agreed. TikTok allows people to speak into the app, and to receive speech, but the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech -- it's societal scale hormone regulation and should be controlled for the health of the national body. It's wild that so many people are up in arms about TikTok when it is a Chinese app that is banned in China, where apps are heavily restricted.

For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?

>the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech

It is, and the court acknowledged that editorial control is protected speech.

The ruling was made based on data privacy ground, not First Amendment Speech ground.

The case law around editorial control is at odds with most platforms' section 230 protection, which makes the fact that TikTok argued that its algorithm _is_ speech pretty different from how most platforms have argued to date (in order to preserve their section 230 protections)

I've understood that social media companies deliberately do not identify as editors because they don't want to be responsible for generated feeds of users. Is this wrong? This is why I'm asking to see evidence of a specific person from a social media company taking direct responsibility over a user's consumed content.

That last sentence needs to be taught in every civics class.

They could have a week of the teacher repeating that single sentence for the entire period

I'm not bent out of shape over the tiktok ban, but you've got me wondering. Do newspapers do speech? Or is it the editors and columnists who do speech? Could a newspaper be shut down by congress if the law didn't say anything about the editors and columnists, merely denying them the means of distribution?

Newspaper is probably a bad example because the first ammendment specifically calls out protecting the press

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That's kind of what I was thinking w.r.t. ”first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.”

No, because "the press" isn't just "the editors and columnists".

"You can drive anywhere you like..." as they take away the super major highways owned by foreign adversaries and leave the ones bending the knee to USA national interests.

It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?

an technofeudal oligarch

Like the CCP?

Yeah exactly, although one a bit more against criticism. But all technofuedal oligarchs and the goats that prop them up are all narcissistic in a sense.

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