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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "Everybody loses. This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived."

The outcome is *exactly* as anyone with a modicum of sense expected.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"—often paraphrased (sensibly!) as "deserve neither and *will lose both*." As you say: we've lost both—who could have predicted that? Yeah; well.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

There's nothing really novel about the instant situation. It's a classic, on repeat.

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Not free speech. Amplification of speech and to an extent freedom of association. Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum. And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor [edit] with likely state security apparatus ties.

> And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor

Genuine question from a non-American: does the 1st amendment only apply to US citizens?

The First Amendment enjoins only the US government.

By its wording, no, because it applies to "Congress". 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.

A later amendment is held to have "incorporated" this prohibition against the state governments as well, though that amendment doesn't actually specify anything in particular. ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.")

It is frequently argued that some act of the government violates the free speech rights of foreigners living abroad, which is to say that whatever it was the government did fell into the class of behaviors prohibited by the first amendment. People tend to find that argument weird; I don't know what its batting average is.

Summing up, nothing extends rights to foreigners, but since the first amendment is a prohibition on the government rather than a grant of rights to certain protected people, foreigners arguably enjoy equal protection.

The 1st Amendment applies to US citizens' freedom to read/receive communications from non-US citizens (or i.e. read books by non-American authors). That's not under dispute: the current SCOTUS ruling both acknowledges, and sidesteps, that.

Emphasis on US citizens

It's not just US citizens, but per the supreme court "foreign organizations operating abroad possess no rights under the U. S. Constitution". In USAID v. Alliance for Open Society International specifically with regards to the first amendment.

---

However TikTok US here is a domestic organization operating domestically merely controlled by a foreign organization operating abroad, which complicates matters. It has rights.

Courts and laws don't need to stop their analysis at "is it a corporation registered in the US." It is a foreign-controlled organization, therefore it is treated as a foreign organization. If you have ever dealt with the defense contracting apparatus, you will know this is how it works.

The US constitution does not apply to citizens - it applies to the government.

Citizens in the US are implicitly allowed to do whatever they like, subject to laws that the government enacts. The constitution describes those areas where the government is allowed to pass laws. All other areas are off limits to the government, and left for the people to do as they like. To emphasize the point, the amendments specify certain areas that the government is extra-especially-not-allowed to create any laws about, like speech.

The extent to which this is observed today is quite dubious. There are lots of laws that the US government passes which have little to do with anything the constitution allows them to do - but they kinda hand-wave around that and gesture toward something, like the "commerce clause" or whatnot as justification.

But in theory - for any law passed - it is unconstitutional unless you can say exactly where in the constitution it is explicitly allowed.

* Having written all that, I will add that "government" above means the US Federal government, not all the other ones. State, local, have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it.

> * Having written all that, I will add that "government" above means the US Federal government, not all the other ones. State, local, have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it.

This is not entirely correct. In general many elements of the Constitution are incorporated and apply at all levels of government. It even outranks state constitutions where the two conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

In other words, states have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it?

No, those aren't other words for the GP's statement.

The Constitution, its Amendments, and decisions of the Supreme Court are not 'federal laws'.

No, in other words, states and local governments are also bound by the Constitution in many of the the same ways that the federal government is.

The major difference is the Tenth Amendment, which sets the states apart by specifying that any powers not "delegated to" the federal government are reserved exclusively for the states. (In practice courts have found many "implied powers" that are not explicitly enumerated).

Federal laws are distinct from the Constitution.

Even if it did, that doesn't matter here, since it's American TikTok users whose speech is being suppressed.

So, usually in a representative democracy (republic or not), the judiciary power is supposed to check and limit the other two (to avoid a tyranny of the majority). You can have that done in two way: with "case law", the only way in some countries (like the UK): basically if a law is enforced against a minority, it will be enforced against the majority. Other countries added a consitution. Its use is to limit the executive and legislative power of the government: the legislative power is supposed to prevent the law/executive order from existing or being executed, and base that decision on the constitution.

TL:DR: no, it doesn't even apply to US citizen, only to US government.

PS: "tyranny of the majority" for some is a definition fascism, i disagree, to me it isn't even proto-fascism, it lack a weird mythos about internal enemies and a few other mythos. It's closer bonapartism, or cesarism at worst. To be clear i think it is a precondition to have fascism (I.E as long as your case law/consitution is enforced for everybody the same way, you aren't a fascist state).

That may be why freedom of the press is also guaranteed.

> Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum.

Yes, it's being suppressed. Criminalization is just one of the many coercive ways to censor something, but states have many tools in the box...

> Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum.

s/criminalized/supressed/ and message still holds true. You can still say the exact same things on a different forum.

It only holds true if you ignore the substance of the right, the message holds true even if no one can hear you in that other forum!

Free speech is satisfied in every country, then, because you can sit at home alone and scream whatever you want at your wall without consequences.

To respond to a comment which has now been deleted:

I don't care about the First Amendment specifically. The US constitution is not magical divinely inspired scripture. I care about the underlying principles of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association, regardless of how well or poorly those are reflected by a specific written law.

You can literally go to any other competing platform and shout the same thing from the rooftops.

No, you can't. TikTok was the only mainstream platform where pro-Palestinian content was allowed to go viral.

Allowed or encouraged?

This is the problem.

We can't be certain that a foreign actor couldn't destabilize our faith in our government by pushing pro-palestinian content.

A small push on a platform can snowball since creators take the stances that don't get them cancelled or want to mimic the popular opinion

I'm a 50+ average Joe who only watches Australian state media (ABC) and I've seen plenty of content that I find shocking from both Israel and Hamas and I came away with sympathy for the Palestinians caught in the middle.

Does that count as pro-Palestinian?

> No, you can't. TikTok was the only mainstream platform where pro-Palestinian content was allowed to go viral.

Reddit shows pro-palestinian/anti-israel propaganda in the front page on a daily basis.

Also, the fact that Israel's invasion of Palestinian territories was an anti-Biden propaganda point that was boosted pretty hard doesn't exactly prove that the likes of China aren't pushing propaganda to destabilize the US. There was clearly a coordinated effort to force-fed the idea that Biden was pro-genocide and a warmonger, and Trump was the only possible candidate to push peace in Ukraine and Palestine.

Lol where do you even get something so easily disproven like this? I care for neither Israel nor Palestine, but I see more or less equal coverage of both sides (not so much my side, funnily enough) on every platform.

Reddit is both anti-Israel and anti-Palestine depending on the sub. News channels will be one or the other depending on the slant and there's plenty on both sides. Most of instagram is people from both sides shouting at each other about how the other gets more representation/are more evil. Same with facebook. I don't use Twitter or any Twitter clones, but I assume Mastodon has a Palestinian slant while Twitter probably has a slight Israeli slant (shitposting aside). Even on HackerNews you'll see both stances often. I guess 4chan would have my stance, since they hate Israel because antisemitism but also hate Arabs.

Do people just make shit up like this for a laugh? I really don't get it, yet see it so often espoused.

Code is speech. By saying you can't distribute a particular app in the United States you're restricting speech.

"Code is speech" is absurdly reductionist in most cases.

Yes, the government censoring Tiktok's source code on Github would be a freedom of speech violation, but that's not what this is about, is it? See also: Tornado Cash. Publishing code facilitating money laundering is fine (you'll find the code still on Github!); running said code to facilitate money laundering isn't.

Or to go with an even more extreme example: Writing code for a self-aiming and firing gun is speech [1], running said code on a gun in your driveway isn't.

The fact that we are still debating such basics of the First Amendment here is baffling. This is almost as trivial as the other well-known limitations in my view (shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater etc.)

[1] At least at the moment, and as far as I know; I think we might see this type of speech being restricted in the same way that some facts about the construction of nuclear weapons are "innate state secrets".

I think it is largely about this.

American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans. That seems like the real 1st amendment issue to me and I was quite surprised to learn that ByteDance only claimed that their own 1st amendment rights were being infringed on (which personally I find to be flimsier).

EDIT: Tornado cash was taken down from GitHub though, so you don't have a point here

Huh? It's up as a public archive on tornadocash/tornado-core as we speak.

> American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans.

Yes, in the same way that American companies and individuals are routinely prohibited by the government from distributing other binaries to Americans, most notably anything that circumvents DRMs as regulated by the DMCA.

I really don't think the people that drafted the First Amendment had apps in mind when they thought of "speech", and would probably consider them something more like machinery (a printing press, a radio (not a radio station!) etc.) Interpreting Tiktok as a type of newspaper (which are widely protected even in democracies without an equivalent to the First Amendment) is much less of a leap of faith compared to considering an iOS executable speech.

Interesting, I didn't follow the tornado cash case super closely, but I do recall it being taken off GitHub for a short time.

So I would also argue that restricting DRM bypassing software is a violation of the 1st amendment and, more importantly, that it's a bad thing to restrict.

We'll never know what they would have thought, but I'll add that actual plans for machinery are definitely speech. We certainly do restrict these plans, with ITAR most notably, and I think it's reasonable to draw that line somewhere.

Note that I never said banning TikTok was as bad idea, just that it restricted speech by way of limiting distribution (which oddly looks unconsidered in the supreme court case), which it absolutely does. I'm uncomfortable with this level of power being granted to the government, but given that TikTok is obviously a spying/malware delivery tool by a foreign borderline hostile government I think it's probably warranted.

I think not being somewhat disturbed by the United States government restricting distribution of an application is a bit weird TBH. That's a huge power to have and can definitely be abused, especially if it's made easier to do so in the future.

The code isn’t the main issue here, it’s the online platform. The apps were only banned as a means to access the platform, not fir the code they contain. The code would be largely useless without the platform infrastructure and data storage behind it.

Does this apply for malware? Trojans? Websites that host child pornography?

Or does it just apply to the brainrotting addiction machine that shoves 800 videos a minute at teenagers?

Note that I didn't say I thought the ban was unwarranted

If your loud agreement with a lie is disseminated far more widely than your loud agreement with a truth, does it feel like you have free speech?

The liberty in that example being raising enough taxes to properly fund our government so people can just go about their lives.

You can no more riase taxes to properly fund government than you can fill a bucket with no bottom.

One only need to look at the Harris campaign to see that the political class in the us is fundamentally innumerate as well as incapable of making a cost benefit analysis.

One only needs look at any administration after 1980.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#t...

The only presidential administration that produced a non-deficit budget was Bill Clinton's second term (~97-00).

Probably because Ross Perot mostly self-funded a third party campaign centered around the national debt and had received 8% of the vote (and 19% in the previous election).

You are missing the point. Benjamin Franklin's quote is about taxation (well at least some people argue):

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

People quote it in the wrong context.

There's a metaculus prediction of whether TikTok will be lawfully banned on 1/20, and they were 99.9% confident it would be in effect. (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effe...)

I personally picked 40% because I couldn't image a change of this sort being consistent with today's political reality.

That said, the fine print of that prediction can be interpreted that the ban is "in effect" even if it not enforced and has no legal liability. I doubt all the predictors were hanging their hat on that fine print when they predicted, though.

I've never understood that quote. Is it ok to give up essential liberty to gain a large, permanent safety? If so, how large and how permanent does it have to be to qualify?

I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.

I also find it comical that banning TikTok is the red line for folks when the NSA and other government agencies have been acting with impunity when it comes to harvesting data for decades now.

People don't care about most things because there are a practically infinite number of things one could care about.

But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.

Bread and circus.

If I were an US citizen this would be the most worrying aspect to me.

Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend?

Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?

It’s literally pay to play with the new administration which is why it doesn’t feel coherent. He’s being courted by Meta to ban and TikTok to not ban.

The elite have always known the value of media and propaganda. TikTok could easily sway electorate decision making in the same way as Meta, X, and YouTube. The US oligarchs have no control over a sizable social media platform. The data security and privacy concerns are theater. The very same logic we use for TikTok applies to our own apps and social media. The only distinction is the false premise they have our interests in mind.

Are congressmen this incompetent? Yes. Are they bought by adversaries? Yes. Are they just humans who are as equally manipulated as you? Yes.

Did Trump get more money? Yes. Plan success.

The assumption (whether right or wrong) is that the NSA and other government agencies are at least doing it to keep Americans safe. And I think there's an assumption (again, whether right or wrong) in the general public that the NSA doesn't harvest the data of Americans themselves – or if they are harvesting the data of Americans, then they're Americans who are up to no good.

I would say moreso it’s that the NSA is at least on some level beholden to the will of the U.S electorate.

Foreign governments not so much.

That's a great point, I'd agree with that.

The issue isn’t data harvesting, and it’s unclear to me why people getting this wrong.

The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.

when the NSA and other government agencies

Because, and I hate to say it, they're our snooping government agencies. I'd rather it be them that have access to all my data than the CCP apparatus.

You're analogizing the freedom to access the internet to driving on the wrong side of the road?

The point of the analogy wasn't to say those two things are the same. It was reductio ad absurdum, a totally valid proof technique in math and logic.

If person A says "X implies Y", then person B points out that X would also imply obvious nonsense Z, it doesn't mean that B is saying Y and Z are the same, or even that Y isn't true. They're just pointing out that X is too general to possibly be true.

The context here was Indian raids. Some rich land owner wanted to pay a one time fee. Benjamin Franklin was saying a 1 time fee wasn't enough - and it would only offer temporary safety rather than ongoing safety higher taxes would offer.

This essential liberty was freedom from being killed. Pretty fucking essential.

That's quite interesting. I'd expect a lot of people to say "the freedom to keep my money" is absolutely essential.

We give up that right in exchange for the permanent safety that a government is supposed to grant. Life is presumably more fundamental than money, but if it's the only truly essential liberty, there is a lot of room to give up others.

On the broadest strokes it makes sense. We gave up the liberty of truly owning the land so the government can build houses on them. From there we more or less are rented the land and almost everyone pays a tax for it.

Homeowners have some power. But if the government really needs to (modern example includes building a new railway), They can elect to forcibly pay you and seize it (eminent domain).

>We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.

Auto transportation was never a right to begin with. As inconvenient as it is, you are free to walk wherever you want without trespassing. Even across a road. But there's a line when you start to simply endanger others by say, walking on a road at 5 mph.

The free speech argument is ridiculous to me. The content wasn’t at issue; the ownership of the platform was.

You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.

>The content wasn’t at issue

You sure about that one? (https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...)

Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content, and implicitly the fact that if a Chinese company owns it, the US has no control over it. Opinion making in the US is always implicitly enforced, not explicitly.

There's a great bit of an old interview with Noam Chomsky talking to an American reporter in which the reporter asks Chomsky: "You think I'm lying to you, pushing a US agenda?" and he responds: "No I think you're perfectly honest, but if you held any other beliefs than you do you wouldn't be sitting in that chair talking to me"

this is the platform version of that concept.

Frankly, I’m not taking seriously an Axios article.

The content wasn’t not outlawed; the platform was not outlawed.

Some aspect of the platform’s ownership has been outlawedd. That’s pretty different.

You didn't respond to the point at all and just repeated your original point.

I responded directly to this

> Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content

Perhaps I should have quoted it so that it was clear.

You didn't even engage with what I said. You dismiss statements of a US senator because of the paper that reports them?

Please address the actual argument, namely that in the US, when you hand platforms to people like Zuckerberg, you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration the way other people change T-Shirts. That is the point of the sale, anybody who is not utterly gullible can see it from a mile away.

On a Chinese owned TikTok Americans get information presented to them, whether intentionally or authentically, that the US powers that be do not like. There is no other security argument, data was already managed by Oracle in the US, the app was technically separated from its Chinese equivalent Douyin.

I engaged directly with what you said. Namely,

>Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content

I’m struggling to see why you say I didn’t.

> you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration

I think this is blatantly not true. Instagram, reddit, and others host a TON of anti-current-administration content.

Now, I’d like to discuss your assertion that there is no other security argument with a series of questions. I do not believe even a casual observer can uniformly answer “no” to the following;

Do you think it is likely that CCP has access to the data obtained by Tik Tok on US phones?

Do you think the US government warnings and security audit results were based on real concerns and findings?

Do you think it is a national security risk for millions of Americans to run CCP controlled code on their phones?

Do you think CCP is able to control the Tik Tok recommendation algorithms to promote their interests, possibly at the expense of American interests?

> I do not believe even a casual observer can uniformly answer “no” to the following;

The only one I wouldn't uniformly answer "no" to is the last one as there's no real evidence for the first two and that one is at least in principle possible but what's important is that private American citizens running entertainment apps on their personal phones isn't a "national security issue".

Running TikTok on government phones in Langley probably is so banning an app like this from government devices is fair enough, but the interest of any individual American is that they have free access to services, domestic or foreign, even if it's literal propaganda because they're the ones who are supposed to make that judgement. Hell even if it's Red Star OS from North Korea and they want to run it on their personal computer, they should be able to.

American interest isn't a synonym for interest of the state department, because if that's the case you're living in a security state (ironically like China) and not a free country.

I just took the liberty to delete TikTok and remove it from my life regardless if it comes back.

Thats funny, I took a look at publicly available harms from various social media apps and deleted Meta apps.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Why stop at two? X seems to just be crazy person x says crazy thing y, so no problem adding that to my dns blacklist, fb and insta are as you say, just as obvious as tiktok. SEO results are dominated by AI vomit blogs, nothing to see there so searech engines are useless. LLMs seem to be mostly ok for finding things right now, I'm sure they will figure out how to mess that up soon enough though. YouTube is really useful for figuring out how to fix my <insert thing broken in my house>. But other than that is just the prototype the other stuff was based on. For news I look at news sources that cost money, wsj, economist etc. because then there is at least a chance that I myself am not the product. For finding music I ask local musicians who they like and follow those referrals a few deep. For seeing funny pet antics I look at my pets. To learn more about tech I come here and follow links.

Unlike TikTok, X is an American social media platform. By default, It is protected under free speech rights. TikTok is Chinese and doesn't get to play that card. End of story.

That doesn't keep them off my dns blacklist though. Seems like whatever card tiktok played was good enough to get tomorrow's administration to change course.

If the Democrats field a candidate that is willing to debase themselves with a stupid dance that goes viral, I feel there may be a change of heart. Assuming Trump doesn't manage to run for a third term.

That quote was about making the state stronger and able to demand more from citizends.

I think that potential EU legislation can and should take this as a cautionary tale.

How so?

Banning foreign tech can be massively unpopular and give a huge tailwind to populists who promise to unban it.

I was thinking:

1. Banning media based on alleged (or real) foreign interference is a very thin line

2. Banning and "unbanning" media based on vague accusations can be exploited for self-serving economical or political interests, which long-term hurts any kind of credibility of media as a whole. And, like it or not: we depend on media. We're not living in self-sufficient communes, at least most of us don't.

3. What made TikTok an issue in the first place: foreign interference (see 1) and problematic content, the policy causes for this probably include insufficient moderation and lack of court accountability. Then there's the question of algorithmic bias: I think this is not a simple question, e.g. is Instagram Reels technically the same or if not, what are the most important differences between their recommendation algorithms?

The EU has the advantage that their politicians don't all own gigantic shares in any social media companies (because the EU doesn't have any), so they are afforded the rare luxury of actually voting for the good of the people. That's why the EU has decent data privacy laws.

The TikTok ban would've been far less problematic if they had created legislation for all companies that curtailed data trading and increased user privacy. But that was never the goal.

Except that no one voted to give up this liberty nor purchase this "safety". The oligarchs determined that they wanted to purchase power and "elected" to take our liberty.

That quote has to do with taxation.

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

and is relevant for more than original intent.

censorship, and similar constraints on free speech, just hide the problems of society so you are unable to act on possible threats as a policymaker.

Different outcome if Harris wins the election though.

Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?

B I N G O

> Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?

Yep

He's making tens of millions of Americans (especially including those who may not have otherwise been political) quite fond of him, bringing back a platform that has definitely been a net positive for him overall, undoing one of his predecessors 'achievements', and so on.

He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.

So he can make a call and cancel a border security bill, but can't make the same call to cancel the TikTok portion of the spending bill before it passed?

Did he not start this entire process during his own presidency? It’s spectacle for the masses and real tv scripts being played out in the White House.

That could simply be a side benefit and not worth Trump making a "deal" to rescue TikTok from an existential threat. Icing on the cake.

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