The Constitution does not place limits on which people are protected by it (you don't have to be a citizen for it to apply as the founders were looking to limit the powers of their government not their citizens). And with the expansion of those protections to corporations through Citizens United, I'd be surprised if a court found that `company + foreign != person + foreign` when they've decided `company == person`. (Well not surprised by this Court.)
> The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
The rest of your comment still stands right in my eyes. National Security has often been used as a means to bypass many things enshrined by the Constitution.
What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.
That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.
> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.
The point you and others try to make is that corporations are people as a result of CU and so other human rights apply to them. This is backwards. SCOTUS and lower courts basically established that free speech applies to corporations same as individuals. But it did not establish their personhood. This is exactly equivalent to saying that a corporation has to pay taxes like a person. It does not make it a person.
So what people get wrong is they say “if a corporation is a person then it gets to do X”. Thats incorrect, nobody except talking heads on TV called it a person. Similarly “if a corporation has the right to free speech it has the right to do X” is incorrect. Having one right does not confer all rights. Again think of it as the idea of corporations get to pay taxes. People get to pay taxes. This did not make corporations people and did not confer any other rights onto corporations.
This isn’t to say that it was the right decision (certainly seems to have done some very bad things). But “corporations are people” is a lay person talking point, not an actual legal doctrine. Therefore you can’t just apply it to other cases because there is nothing to apply.
You are correct that free speech isn’t limited by your citizenship status.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...
It's not like any interpretation is valid but there are plenty of valid ones.
And of course it makes sense, because the legal system was created by the very laws it upholds. If you think it should be different, then you'll have to convince a lot of people to change a lot of laws and probably parts of the US constitution
It does, because the Supreme Court's ruling is the legally binding interpretation.
The EFF are just some people with an non-legally binding opinions.
This is red alert talk. We need to make damned sure we know exactly what we're asking for here and that we're not giving up more than we mean to.
Another extreme, let's say the government declared that you may speak freely but only by filling out a web form routed to Dave. Great guy. I mean they haven't technically taken away your right to speak? And someone will hear what you say.
Both of these would he flagrant violations of 1A as I'm sure you'd agree. But what this means is that implicit to 1A the government has limits on how many places it can deny you speech and limits on how much they can deny you an audience. And you can't hide behind the "well it's just divestiture not a ban" because the courts aren't blind to POSIWID.
So the more nuanced question is does banning TikTok meaningfully affect the ability of Americans to speak. And I think because of how large they are you could answer yes to this question. Americans know exactly what they're signing up for with their TT accounts and want to post there. TikTok but owned by an American would be legal so the platform itself isn't the issue. And saying TT can't operate in the US and actively preventing Americans from accessing it are two very different actions.
This argument touches on the more valid defense for TikTok: restricting which people can host speech is a good way to restrict content, by punishing those who tend who host certain kinds of content. Personally, I'm okay with requiring a US company control TikTok in the US for national security reasons, but I would've preferred the law go through strict scrutiny. Laws can restrict what would usually be Constitutionally protected rights as long as they have good reasons and little room for collateral damage. If what Congress has been claiming is true, this law should pass that standard.