China doesn't claim that free speech and personal freedom are part of their core values
TikTok isn’t being banned because of free speech or not but because the usage of their algorithms allows the app to influence how Americans think about different issues. China has recognized this as a threat and as such has banned foreign adversary social media companies from operating within its borders.
Likewise the United States has recognized that this is a serious threat as well and has sought to do the same.
Both countries claim to want to defend their systems of governments so it stands to reason they are just taking reciprocal actions here.
The “free speech” angle is just Chinese propaganda. We stop businesses from operating in the United States all the time and sanction companies and stop them from doing business within our financial network all the time. TikTok is just some random company and we can stop it from doing business here. Free speech isn’t a meaningful discussion point here.
Moreover it seems like security theater.
> Moreover it seems like security theater.
Meh. At a minimum it's just an economic reciprocation. If China doesn't allow our wildly successful social media companies to operate in China, we can as a matter of trade decide to stop their wildly successful social media company from operating in our country.
That’s a stupid trade policy.
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-...
> Supreme Court wrote in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958):
>"It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for advancements of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."
In a discussion where the First Amendment related to speech is at the center of the discussion, it's important for people to define what they mean by First Amendment Association versus Freedom of Speech as defined in the First Amendment, especially when the discussion is primarily framed as an issue relating to Freedom of Speech. If someone is asking for clarification of what someone else means, that adds to the discussion, it doesn't detract from it. We can't discuss things if people are unwilling to explain what they mean, particularly within context.
To that end, I'd encourage you to read the section on Limits on the Freedom of Association in the article you provided to see why that line of reasoning doesn't apply here.
> What are First Amendment Association rights?
As a substantive comment that adds meaningfully to the conversation? You think people believe you were asking the parent for clarification on their personal definition or usage of a word by broadly asking “what is x?”
Or are you suggesting due to you having other substantive comments elsewhere you are due the right to make unsubstantial comments that do not increase the level of the discussion?
I think you are being overly argumentative throughout the thread, the example I singled out being exceptionally bad.
Is that the case or is that just assumed what the government means when they say issues of national security? I thought they meant our devices could be hacked by malicious code in TikTok apps.
Which, if true, means that the US has been influencing the rest of the world for the past 20 years through all the other social networks.
The “personal freedom” part would be most immediately salient here.
Free speech wouldn’t apply if the app wasn’t in use already. But so many millions of Americans use the app already that it easily is about free speech as well.
We can hardly claim to have a democracy while acting like the population at large needs to be controlled in such a way. It's contradictory.
There's nothing contradictory about it because living in a democratic society doesn't mean that you have free reign to do anything that you want.
It's great. /s
Look: I live next to a reservation, where the US gov committed war crimes. There's a fort up the hill a quarter mile up from where I am, which was a "residential school" where the US gov put kidnapped children to "educate them".
You are 100% right that democracy can coexist with all manner of depravity.
We get it, yall can happily do enact horrors you feel like enacting on the rest of us and still enjoy feeling smug that we don't like it.
But that fact means that something being "democratic" does not mean that we should respect what you do just because you have a veneer of democracy across it.
I am profoundly grateful I have so many greater crimes commited by the US to contextualize what, in the big scheme of things, is a meaningless and goofy action. If I didn't know that they were spearheading the literal ecocide of the planet while incarcerating more people than have every been locked up, while simultaniously funding a genocide in Israel, I'd probably feel like this is some kind of espeically bad thing.
But it's not; it barely even registers once you start looking at the millions of people that the US has directly murdered in the last 250 years.
But It's Great! (tm)
Americans... sorry I meant United Statesians, are really bad people. We might even be the worst people on the planet by any conceivable measure.
Since we're so bad and we've murdered so many millions of people, I guess there's no redeeming us and anything good we've ever done was meaningless so I say we go ahead and ban TikTok as our final coup de grâce in this terrible and twisted timeline.
The fact that these people don't want to do that, and would rather rely upon walled gardens and algorithms to feed them short-form content to inform their opinions already implies a desire for paternalism in of itself. You look at some these people talking about they were "lied" to about how China is third-world dump (where did they get that idea?) and in fact it's bustling cities with skyscrapers, when there are plenty of youtube videos showing the modern Chinese cities since it's inception.
When they didn't try to verify their assumptions with a trivial 2 minute search should tell you that these people want to be propagandized and will always be propagandized. Whether it's American Propaganda or Chinese Propaganda or whatever, they aren't ever going to take the responsiblity to actually to challenge their own preconceptions, they'll just sway from one extreme of propaganda to the next.
These people, by rejecting the old internet and choosing walled gardens, they want to be treated paternalistically. That's why they'll always reference other walled gardens like Facebook or Instagram, they'll never reference older forums or image boards. And so if we don't take that role, well the CCP would be quite content to fill in.
The US (and every country on the planet) has rules and regulations around who can do business in their country and who their citizens may do business with.
If you want to argue that the U.S. shouldn't be able to prohibit its citizens from doing business with TikTok you should spend some time generalizing that argument and figuring out a good reason we shouldn't be able to prohibit Americans from selling weapons to Russia, or allowing Russian companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States to build weapons to send back to Russia. (or any other scenario you want to make up)
"Free speech" is not a good argument here. TikTok isn't a "free speech" platform. It's just a random company selling products and services in the United States.
Free speech doesn't protect free speech platforms: free speech protects every speaker, platform, and listener against regulations targeted on the basis of content/viewpoint.
OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time all three branches got the First Amendment wrong (one of the most popular 1A mantras — the one about fire in a crowded theater — came from dicta in what is now widely recognized as one such instance.)
Yes, speech does that. "The algorithm" is curation but the content we are talking about is mostly Americans talking to other Americans. The goal is to control and suppress that communication.
There are perfectly valid arguments to ban TikTok. And hey, there are arguments to be made that free speech shouldn't be absolute. But that doesn't fit into the American self image, so the argument must be obscured to reduce the dissonance. Your argument in particular maps perfectly to "Some kinds of speech are dangerous and people must be protected from them."
Whether people share memes or communicate American to American isn't material. We know this is true because a company with the same features and products can be shut down if it's discovered that the same company engaged in other illegal activities (let's say money laundering or human trafficking to make it clear) and so someone's First Amendment rights would be abridged by the shut down of the company.
TikTok is just in the same scenario and has now found itself afoul of US laws and regulations and has to adjust by selling itself or it can exit the market.
The other thing here is that you'd have to convincingly argue that people who have never used TikTok (me for example) have now had their First Amendment rights violated, but there has been no change in my First Amendment rights. I can still use my freedom of speech as I could before.
The youngest tiktokers weren't even born yet or were just infants/toddlers when Google first got banned there. They may not understand what's going on here because by the time they came of age nearly all major western social media sites were already blocked there and for them it's status quo now. From their point of view the US is being the censor. They are at prime age to go on red book out of spite, but I hope they'll eventually understand.
If this was a ban on an American company it would be a different story.
If Country A bans imports from Country B, it's entirely reasonable to respond in kind.
China infringing on the inalienable rights of Chinese citizens is not a source of strength. It's weakness. It hurts China.
Responding in kind is me responding to my neighbors fire by dousing the living room with gasoline and lighting a match.
Free trade should also be fair trade.
Personally I wouldn't really give a shit about TikTok if the Chinese market was actually at all open to US companies for this area (and if there were reasonable protections about personal data in the US overall).
That was not the freedom of speech your supposed to hear on social media. That's why it's a threat. Be like Twitter and ban those accounts instead.