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Comment by moussess | Hacker News Reader

The Supreme Court with its unanimous decision made it very very clear it’s not about freedom of speech, but about foreign adversary having access to data profile of 180 million US citizens. And believe in lawmakers argument of foreign adversary propaganda to those citizens.

Why do people on hacker news keep drudging up freedom of speech ad nauseum??

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I wouldn't be surprised if the freedom of speech nonsense is an influence campaign by the PLA.

It is just such a ridiculous argument but if you repeat nonsense enough times, people start repeating it back as if it is real.

We never had to deal with this before because the WW2 generation was obviously not stupid enough to let the KGB publish children's books and Saturday morning cartoons inside the US and have a KGB influence campaign that says to ban the books/cartoons would be a free speech issue.

Obviously a non-starter. What you see with Tiktok is how completely infiltrated and corrupted things are in the US in 2025.

The unrestricted war from China started a long time ago and the IMO the US has already lost.

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." ― Sun Tzu

> I wouldn't be surprised if the freedom of speech nonsense is an influence campaign by the PLA.

As is "everybody is installing Red Note." The people who think this is true are the people who use tiktok.

It's really about how the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov and stock market regulation, by a company that doesn't have to instantly respond to pressure from the Executive branch, could possibly refuse to instantly comply from pressure from US intelligence agencies, could refuse to comply with search requests from US law enforcement, and extensive lobbying from Facebook to cripple a competitor that Facebook ignored until it was too late.

It's not a free speech issue.

Given that the infra for serving US tiktok customers is in the United States(inside of Oracle Cloud), I am curious if Tiktok/bytedance responds to US law enforcement requests.

> the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov

You have it backwards. The US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is 100 percent beholden to the Chinese gov.

Did you read the opinion? It did its analysis as requiring some level of scrutiny because of the free speech implications under intermediate (and in Sofomayor’s concurrence strict) scrutiny. It held the national security concern outweighed the free speech concern but it absolutely did not say it was relevant in the analysis.

Of course I read it, opinion said

“ At the same time, a law targeting a foreign adversary’s control over a communications platform is in many ways different in kind from the regulations of non-expressive activity that we have subjected to First Amendment scrutiny”

And the opinion talks about foreign adversary, those exact words, at least 30 times. It mentioned freedom of speech twice

So it was a free speech issue, wild.

Because they read random crap on X they thought sounded smart and are now simply regurgitating it with no further thought or consideration.

And “free speech absolutism (for me, not for you or anyone else)” is the current right-wing cause celebre.

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