The people pretending that the TikTok law is a speech issue are ignoring that no one was requiring TikTok to change their content at all. The law was written to allow for 0 impact on users if the CCP-connected parent company simply divested.
Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company. But ByteDance’s allegiance isn’t to their shareholders.
It seems to me that they aren't "pretending" they honestly believe the issue is about free speech. Laws that does not explicitly curtail free speech but effectively still does just that can certainly be created.
I don't know if it's a free speech issue but legally speaking it's definitely not a first amendment issue because the law targets foreign corporations and the Constitution doesn't apply to foreign entities
But there are American users making and viewing content on that platform.
The physical equivalent would be if China was hosting a TED-talk-like conference where anyone can come and hold a presentation, and after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in, neither to hold presentations nor to listen to them.
Technically that doesn't violate the constitution, but it's not difficult to argue that it does violate the spirit of the constitution
That's true and that's actually something the courts consider. The standard is unreasonable burden. So it's not necessarily anything that makes speech harder, but if it does make speech unreasonably burdensome then it would run afoul of the first amendment.
So if the alternative places where such speech could be hosted were extremely limited, expensive or very difficult to use then the law banning a platform could create an unreasonable burden.
Suggesting that a shuttering of TikTok represents any impediment to your First Amendment rights — even if no comparable alternative existed — is to misunderstand what was promised by the Constitution.
Of course, plenty of comparable alternatives do exist.
Correct, but requiring American content creators and consumers to move to a different platform (when those platforms are already large, have huge reach, and have low switching costs) would likely not meet the bar for an unreasonable burden. I don't think the courts would strike down this law on first amendment grounds.
For the sake of the one downvote, please allow me to complete the implied dialogue tree:
>>>> It would be harder for me to learn piano if my teacher was convicted of murder.
>>> Nonsense. You can easily find another piano teacher.
>> Right, just like people who use TikTok can easily find another short form video platform.
> That's a terrible analogy.
Nonsense. If TikTok was convicted and shut down because of rampant financial fraud, your First Amendment rights would be similarly unaffected.
TikTok was told to close because they refused to bring their corporate ownership in line with requirements set out in US Code passed by Congress. The content of any video was never at issue.
Just as a thought experiment, take your reasoning and try to ban as much speech with as much specificity as you can. You can't ban the content of the speech but you can ban venues where speech takes place and and means of transmitting speech so long as at least one venue and means remains.
> after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in,
I think if that were the situation then yes the first amendment would be in issue. But I don't think anyone is saying that this is happening here. As I understand it this has nothing to do with what anyone is saying on TikTok and there are no social or protest movements gaining ground on TikTok that the government is trying to suppress. The only issue here is the foreign ownership and how that ownership is used. I don't think anyone is saying the government is doing this to silence any TikTok users
An issue arises when popularity is manipulated through artificial boosting by an adversarial government.
At some point, it becomes State Propaganda masquerading as grassroots activists.
Control over content can influence and distort public discourse and understanding. This is also against the spirit of free expression envisioned in the constitution and instead injecting an intentionally divisive voice.
The physical equivalent would be if the Chinese intelligence apparatus opened an auditorium where they said "come sit here and let us read your mind and we will feed you what advances our national interest".
> the Constitution doesn't apply to foreign entities
Sort of true. Sometimes the constitution just says "persons", which has generally been interpreted to anyone.
But it's not material, because the 1st amendment is a restriction on congress. That's why it starts with "Congress shall make no law...". The argument isn't about if TikTok has rights, it's about if congress is authorized to take this action. They're inter-mixed a bit because if TikTok does have the rights they claim, then congress automatically isn't authorized, but they are separate.
you're right, my statement is an extreme oversimplification and there are situations where the constitution does apply to noncitizens (like due process during deportation) or places where things are unclear (if speech of foreign nationals were being regulated). But this case where we are talking about a foreign media platform's right to operate in the US without any reference to the content they are broadcasting... this seems to be one of those rare clear cut cases. I mean no one saw any issue with America effectively banning RT.
There were some people on here saying that national security is just a pretense and the government is actually doing this because they dislike some of the content being posted on TikTok. I don't know if that's the case but if it were then I would concede there is a first amendment issue. But absent that I think it's safe to say that this case doesn't raise the first amendment.
> But absent that I think it's safe to say that this case doesn't raise the first amendment.
I still think it does, but it's Apple and Google's right to propagate the app, not TikTok's right to be on the app store. And since neither Apple nor Google are party to the lawsuit, nobody really has standing to take that particular line of argument.
Yes, of course Congress has the authority to restrict foreign companies purely from the Commerce Clause alone. Their power over restricting foreign entities in the U.S. is nearly total. The U.S. is under no obligation to host speech or operations from any foreign business, entity, or application for any reason whatsoever.
No, they couldn't ban just one book printed by a French company. They'd have to ban the company entirely. And that's what happened here too. It's not just TikTok that got banned, but all of ByteDance's other apps too, e.g., Marvel Snap and CapCut.
And it's also important that divesting was an option instead. In your analogy, they couldn't ban the books outright, but could demand they be published somewhere else.
No. But they could ban American companies from providing services directly to that French publisher (e.g., a US company couldn't print books for or sell paper to that French publisher). However, a US law could not stop me from legally reading a copy I owned, or from selling or giving that copy to someone else within the US...
The First Amendment case would be much clearer if this was actually about banning access to TikTok (it's not: TikTok self-blocked US users, Amazon/Oracle shut off servers, and app stores stopped distributing to US users). TikTok could choose to operate their service (like many other Chinese companies) using only non-US infra and without relying on American companies to distribute their app; indeed, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, hosted entirely from Chinese servers, continued to work just fine.
This case is also a reminder of why the iOS App Store is so bad for rights: at least on Android, you could sideload a 'banned' app; Google can comply with the law and US users can still download TikTok. On iOS, you don't have that option.
Using such restraints on foreign trade to censor publications is a very transparent end run around 1A.
It is a big sign that we live in a police state that the courts are willing to be politicized to the point that they are willing to ignore this obvious trampling upon the human rights of both the app publisher and the app’s users.
Also, iOS users can go buy a tablet or phone that can sideload. Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
This isn't an "end run around 1A" - the law doesn't target any speech or content at all. TikTok can keep operating with all the same content, they just need to separate from Chinese ownership first. If this was about censorship, why include that option?
This isn't about censoring content, it's about preventing ByteDance from collecting personal data from 170M Americans that Chinese law requires them to hand over to their government.
It's not end run around 1A. 1A is a law protecting the people (and their various forms of organization) of the United States. Congress has every right to regulate or ban foreign entities of any kind for any reason from operating in the United States.
The rights enumerated by the constitution are human rights (“endowed by their creator”) and are not specific to americans.
Furthermore, the 1A is a restriction on the government and isn’t related to whether or not someone is a citizen.
There are lots of things congress is prohibited from doing under the constitution, including against foreign entities. Congress can’t ban a foreign religion operating in the US, for example.
So not "rights enumerated by the constitution." Which is why the degree to which the First Amendment provides protection does turn on legal status with America [1].
Oh please. TikTok isn't a publication. The individual creators on TikTok have not been censored; they've merely been told that TikTok is not permitted to operate in the US, and that they will have to post their creations -- unedited, unaltered -- on other services. And those other services exist, and have wide reach, so it's not like saying "sure, you can continue to create, but your audience is now 5% the size it was before".
> Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
Sounds like you're arguing against yourself. TikTok hasn't actually been banned.
The constitution applies to American users and to non-Americans on American soil. It's not like the cops can execute you for being here on a tourist visa.
The constitution applies to the government. It establishes the government and defines -- and therefor limits -- what the government is allowed to do.
Corporations are considered "legal persons" for the purpose of applying the law to them in a convenient and organized way, but in real life, corporations are just organizational models employed by human beings for the purpose of coordinating their activities.
The restrictions applicable to what the government is allowed to do to "people" as defined in the constitution apply regardless of what organizational models those people are using to coordinate their activities. Ultimately, everything in society reduces to people, and the government is not entitled to use reified abstractions to escape the constraints on its authority.
Corporations have First Amendment rights as ruled by Citizens United v. FEC. Even though corporations don’t have a vote (which is its own can of worms because of their economic power, money = vote), they still enjoy some of the same constitutional protections as individuals do.
No, there's no such reasoning in that decision, which confirmed that speech itself is protected by the first amendment, regardless of who originates it.
And this ruling had little to do with any of that -- the first amendment challenge was that the ban imposed content-based burdens on the speech of the users of TikTok, and the court ruled that it did not. So the ban therefore survived the challenge under intermediate scrutiny.
The domestic vs. foreign ownership element of the ruling only pertained to the evaluation of whether there was a compelling government interest in enacting the ban, not whether the government was exempt from first amendment scrutiny at all.
The constitution applies to the people of the United States. It's in the first line: "We the people of the United States..."
That Constitution also includes numerous clauses granting Congress the authority to regulate international commerce (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3). TikTok is a foreign commercial enterprise. We have restricted foreign products and services since the Boston Tea Party.
But wouldn't you be infringing the rights of the US users if you ban the platform they want to message other US users over? Isn't that indirectly infringing their free speech? Or does the first amendment not protect stuff like this?
But can the government actively interfere with my communication by banning the platform? If the government notices that a lot of critics are organizing over Discord, can they ban Discord, because they're not banning speech specifically, only a platform used to spread the speech?
I think what you raise is something the courts should consider if the government were trying to shut down a platform because of what it's users were doing on it. But it's not a live issue in this case. There is no allegation that the US seeks to suppress TikTok because of what Americans are posting on it. TikTok isn't saying the government is doing that and I don't believe the government is seeking to control the speech of TikTok users. The consern seems to be more about who controls the algorithm and data collection (a foreign state with adversarial interests) and it seems to me that it has nothing to do with anything Americans are posting on TikTok. I mean the content on TikTok isn't all that political or revolutionary
Because the drafters knew they wouldn't/couldn't/aren't allowed to/would only be able to do so to someone more under the thumb of the US government?
The actual purpose of a law or system is the actual outcome of it and not what it's dressed up to say its purpose is. A law that says "we don't allow mosques unless they're owned by people not descended from countries on a terrorism watch list" is still an infringement of the freedom of religion. We don't have to pretend there's good faith here.
> Because the drafters knew they wouldn't/couldn't/aren't allowed to/would only be able to do so to someone more under the thumb of the US government?
This is at best vacuously true. Since China is the most powerful adversary of the US, you'd say that literally anyone else is more under the thumb of the US government than they are.
Given how laws and American rights have been established to work. Yes, absolutely. They just need a legally acceptable reason to do so separate from the speech. Banning a platform because of speech they don't want isn't allowed, but banning a platform for other reasons is, even if that platform also happens to facilitate speech.
Like with tik tok, the ban itself isn't a speech issue because there's nothing bytedance can change about it's communication to not be banned, it's an ownership problem.
By your very broad definition of infringement if a newspaper refuses to pay it's taxes, and then the government shuts down the newspaper down for that, this would be infringement.
Clearly it's not.
Yes, the government can make laws that effect speech platforms just like we can make them pay taxes.
He wouldn't have had to resort to complex modes of influence, that's for sure. It's very scary that we've gotten to the point where people are claiming to "protect democracy" by proposing to allow institutions controlled by incumbent politicians to regulate who is allowed to say what in the lead-up to elections.
Go read the SC unanimous judgment. It’s very clear and lays out exactly why they’re wrong.
In fact they do a lot more than that because they state off the bat that there isn’t even a first amendment question (a Chinese corporation doesn’t have first amendment rights in the U.S.), but they go beyond, assume the first amendment does apply, and still explain why that isn’t valid.
SCOTUS, as they've done in many recent cases, is artfully skirting the substance of the issue.
How is this ban actually enforced? By fining American companies for serving specific content. That is the First Amendment issue. SCOTUS simply asserting that it's not in order to make their ruling convenient does not actually make it so.
Copyright (in the US) was literally created by the same people who wrote the 1st Amendment. Copyright is in the Constitution itself. It was very obviously an exception from the start.
"Foreign governments saying things" also existed at the same time the 1st Amendment was written, and there were no carveouts from 1st Amendment in light of that.
In any case: If SCOTUS during its early cases on copyright law (or copyright on the Internet) simply asserted "this has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment," they'd also be wrong. That would be a clear avoidance tactic not to wrangle with the substantive issue. In reality, the big cases on copyright are riddled with 1st Amendment questions, considerations, and constraints.
They ban American companies from distributing or maintaining the application, not specific content. More of a "criminal conspiracy" type of behavior rather than something that would relate to wikileaks or whoever. Can as well argue what is being banned is the data-collection side of the operation since it's the part that depends on using the app. Those companies still have the freedom to publicly state whatever the CCP has to say.
The law indeed needed to be carefully written to "skirt" any first amendment violations, and SCOTUS unanimously agreed it had done so successfully.
"Content" is narrower than "speech". In that case the restriction was described as "content-neutral". Hence it didn't require strict scrutiny, only intermediate scrutiny. Which seems like the blueprint for how they wrote the TikTok law.
I don't think that is clear at all. Refer to their amicus brief where they explain their reasoning in detail: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/brief-amici-curiae-wr... The gist of it, which you missed, is that they think the ban violates Americans first amendment rights.
Tiktok definitely isn't press and algorithm-powered social media feeds can hardly be considered free speech. It's not even speech - it's broadcast! We've regulated broadcast since its' inception.
While Tiktok doesn't have literal printing presses, neither do TV networks.
How can the first amendment be interpreted so broadly that large multinational corporations financially supporting politicians is considered free speech, yet so narrowly that social media isn't part of the media?
Oh I agree. Citizen United was wrongly decided, and the only people who agree with it are those who benefit from the corruption it has enabled. It's far from settled law, though obviously it's not changing in the next 4 years.
As for social media - it's an advertising platform. The algorithm is deciding what you see based on what sells ads. Who is exercising free speech there? Tiktok and Meta are exercising corporate speech in the name of profit making. They have no right to host such a platform, and the government certainly has the right to regulate it if they do have one.
The government can't compel Meta, Tiktok or individual users to say X, Y, or Z, they can declare the ads-based algorithmic-content business model illegal or subject it to strict regulation - especially when its in the furtherance of free speech, like preventing Facebook from deplatforming people for having the wrong opinions that advertisers don't like.
> large multinational corporations financially supporting politicians
You do realize that Rupert Murdoch was forced to become a US citizen because of the same laws that are in question about US media ownership.
Social media is 100% the media. Social media has freedom of speech. Businesses don't have freedom of ownership, including media business. Kinda fucky, but this is very long standing law.
As I understand things, they tend to leave gun rights stuff to the enormous and well-funded NRA.
In cases from "Roe vs Wade" to "Masterpiece Cakeshop" and "Hobby Lobby" the ACLU came out against things supported by the religious right. And although the ACLU regularly supports the free speech rights of swastika-tattoed nazis - Republicans don't see that as supporting their side, because no reasonable person wants to think people with swastika tattoos are on their side.
Unfortunately so. It didn't use to be that way - the ACLU used to be so principled that they would defend literal Nazis' rights. But they've fallen a long way since then.
Especially when individual liberty is in contention with collective liberty. This is the "hard problem" for organizing a free society.
Eliminating traffic laws would make individuals more free in a literal sense, but those rules also make it so people can get from place to place quickly and safely. The liberty interpretation is that what people actually want is to travel, not to drive however they like. So you trade a freedom most people don't miss to enable another.
Vaccine mandates are a great example of this contention where under normal circumstances nobody cares about having to get vaccinated but they do care about not getting polio. Covid was strange in that the number of people opposed was significantly larger than I think anyone expected.
Agree, but (and yes, whataboutism ahoy!) one can make observations about a similar lack or principle on the right.
It always seemed to me that the US was fuzzy when the very clear text of the Constitution rubbed up against the realities of a complex State. For example,
- the 1st Amendment doesnt say the speech can be overridden by a compelling national security interest, which is the argument here. But the US has security services, and legitimately there are cases where to allow speech does harm. But if you are going to be honest, shouldnt there be an amendment giving the State an override of 1A?
- 2A is infamous, of course, and for the love of $deity lets not discuss it here, but why does "not abridged" get overriden by bans in, say, machine guns, which have been on the books since the Chicago gangster era? Either you abridge or not. Or at least be honest about it .
- Some speakers in the covid era made a very strong appeal to personal bodily autonomy when it came to vaccine mandates. Ok, let's follow that. Does it not then also follow that a woman cannot be forced to carry a baby to term? That would seem logical, but the connection is not made. Conversely there is no "commonweal" override written into the Constitution and we are left with random SCOTUS decisions over the last 240 years.
Because the people 250 years ago could not have imagined the problems that we'd have invented for ourselves in these days. It was always meant to be a living document with a process of adding and changing amendments. And in between that time the the way people interact has grown more complex. If you took those same intelligent men and dropped them into today, the Amendments would look different.
It’s not a certain company, it’s a whole class of them (partially defined by POTUS’ whims)
Sure, the government can do that, and when doing so infringes on Americans’ speech or access to information, it introduces First Amendment questions that must be addressed.
“The government says CNN can’t post stories from BBC” isn’t immediately resolved by “it’s a foreign company.”
It sounds like you're saying that there's some content on TikTok that Instagram Reels/YouTube Shorts/etc. won't allow on their platforms. Is that correct? If so, can you give an example?
Both of these I suspect are handled sorta explicitly by giving the state the power to do whatever it wants if it is important and essential enough.
The courts have various categories for how important something needs to be to allow certain levels of unconstitutionality, eg suppose I have "legally" built the nuclear device featured in a recent kurgesatz video with enough kiloton to start by itself a nuclear winter kill every person on the planet... I seriously suspect SCOTUS will be ok with the state taking the ignition keys away from me
In the sense of an adherent to Nazism, yes, neo-Nazis are Nazis.
In the context of "literal Nazis" the ACLU had argued for the rights of - like the German American Bund, which contained actual members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, not exactly.
No that would contradict freedom of association. People are free to form closed, self-censoring groups if they choose to. What we want to avoid is the government forcing it on people.
The paradox of tolerance specifically states that one must not be tolerant of intolerance. Hence, a paradox.
Tolerance is a social contract of leaving alone others whose ways differ from your own so long as they do the same for you.
One must not tolerate those that call for violence and subjugation of differing groups, which is almost the exact opposite meaning your comment seems to be implying in my reading of it, instead calling for wholly unfiltered speech by whosoever should deem to speak.
Racists and similar hatemongers calling for others to tolerate them while they are screaming for those they disparage to be caste down and out cannot be tolerated in any reasonable forum.
As such, any reasonable forum must ban some facets of free speech.
That we disallow this power for governments is a reasonable limit on the powers of the elected to rule, lest those powers be abused.
The problem with this interpretation is of course that it lets you be as intolerant as you want to anyone you decree intolerant. Which is why it is so popular.
For those unaware of ACLU's change over the last 10 or so years, here is an example:
In September 2021, the ACLU wrote a New York Times op-ed defending vaccine requirements, arguing they actually advance civil liberties by protecting the most vulnerable and allowing more people to safely participate in public life. David Cole and Daniel Mach, the authors, wrote that individual liberty isn't absolute when it puts others at risk.
Surely, one can be pro vaccine mandates. But I would not expect a civil liberties organization to hold this position.
Pretty much every measure taken against COVID had been taken many times before during the numerous epidemics of cholera, typhus, yellow fever, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza that plagued (no pun intended!) the US since its founding.
Requiring inoculation/vaccination, shut downs, masks, and quarantines was generally considered a legitimate use of state power to prevent the spread of deadly diseases and not an infringement of civil liberties.
Actually this goes back to even before the US was founded. George Washington imposed mandatory smallpox inoculation on his army during the revolution. This probably contributed significantly to his victory because both the British army and native tribes that had sided with the British were heavily weakened by smallpox but Washington's was not due to that inoculation requirement.
Please share any pre-Covid example of the government shutting down all public gatherings including weddings and funerals and closing the vast majority of businesses for a substantial period of time.
There may have been isolated examples in the past, but the degree was not the same.
You wouldn't expect a civil liberties organization to have an opinion on containing a dangerous pandemic? In addition to working at the ACLU the people doing their work are also humans.
Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
That’s a clear curtailment of their civil liberties. And assuming they’re in a rural area may not harm anyone else either.
This is an obviously extreme example but the point still stands. Any civil liberties organization cannot focus absolutely narrowly on that question in every situation but has to apply a broader approach.
Surely you see the difference between someone having Strategic weapons in their garage, and the government forcing someone to take a medicine that they don't want to take, right?
All individual rights are balanced with the rights of other individuals/society. You can be given the choice to vaccinate or be forcefully quarantined. This has occurred many times in the US and the right of the state to do this has been upheld.
While corona was weak we will eventually seem some dangerous bullshit spread and the anti-vax dipshits are going figure out exactly what their rights entail as they are being drug from their house at gunpoint with the express will of the majority of the population.
Quarantine powers are subject to the “strict scrutiny” standard. Freedom of domestic travel is as fundamental as freedom of speech in Constitutional law. This has been thoroughly adjudicated many times and in many contexts by the US Supreme Court, including many attempts by the government to exploit regulatory and taxation loopholes to indirectly effect that outcome.
It is unambiguously unconstitutional to prevent everyone from traveling, even for quarantine purposes. It must be evaluated on an individual basis subject to judicial review to establish that the individual presents a clear and present danger, and only for a very limited duration. No different than restrictions on speech.
This is the reason no State anywhere, regardless of who was in power, instituted hard lockdowns during COVID. This is known to be settled law to such an extent that attempting to prevent the population from traveling without clearing the strict scrutiny standard would be met with an instant Federal court injunction, likely coupled with a withering public statement questioning the competence of the State’s Attorney General. There was no upside in taking that risk.
The idea that you can forcibly quarantine someone solely because you don’t like their choices is wishcasting, not based on credible Constitutional foundations.
There's a big difference between quarantining people who you know have a dangerous disease for a few weeks until they're better, and quarantining the entire country for years because you're not sure who has a dangerous disease.
Unlikely, freedom of domestic travel is subject to the strict scrutiny Constitutional standard (international travel is a more open question). Banning freedom of travel for the entire country would be equivalent to banning freedom of speech for the entire country, from a Constitutional perspective.
Interestingly, the myriad freedom of travel cases happened so long ago and were so decisively settled as a strong right that everyone has kind of forgotten about them because there is little interesting left to decide. Not as controversial as questions around the meaning of speech. But I think the last significant questions were addressed around the Second World War.
Yes, the government has quarantine powers, which have been broadly established. They did not necessarily have the right to go about it how they did in 2020, which was through OSHA rules and other "soft power" rather than through their power to quarantine people. Almost nobody was actually quarantined in relation to COVID.
A broad, sweeping quarantine in relation to COVID would have been so unpopular that you can see why they went about it in a "softer" way, but sometimes the government can't have its cake and eat it too.
Those vaccine mandates were broadly ruled illegal, even in light of the quarantine power. These sorts of civil liberties are complicated, and the ACLU found themselves on the wrong side of this one.
> Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
If someone actually went to court over this, I would hope/expect that the NRA would send some lawyers. The ACLU isn't that into the second amendment and has never been. However, nobody has gone to court over this. They did go to court over vaccine mandates.
By the way, the only grounds the government would have to stand on here are radiation-related. It is broadly legal to use explosives on your own property unless you're too close to someone else's property. It is also broadly legal to build your own weapons.
Advocacy organizations shouldn't aspire to extremes. The ACLU should offer reasonable and practical help and commentary on civil liberties. Otherwise, you get the modern NRA that fights every law about firearms.
This neglects that some people can't be vaccinated or they would still be vulnerable even after an effective vaccination. You're not just vaccinated to protect yourself, it also reduces risk for the people around you.
>> Many American civil liberties organizations think that the the ban is a free speech issue:
> Honestly these "civil liberties" orgs have lost the plot a long time ago, or are just at "useful idiot" mode
Exactly. When I read "many American civil liberties organizations think," my first thought was "they think a lot of things, that doesn't mean what they think is true or a good idea."
Additionally: they're all essentially lawyers arguing one side of the case. Just listening to them is not going to lead to the correct outcomes (e.g. if courts only listened to prosecutors only, tons of innocent people would go to jail; if they only listened to defense attorneys, tons of guilty people would go free).
I keep seeing this type of comment here, like a sell is the obvious thing to do. Why? Selling / divesting TikTok US under these circumstances would surely not fetch the best price. In addition they would immediately create a global competitor that have the same product. Why would ByteDance the company or its investors want that?
Not to mention, why would they trust the US to pay tens of billions of dollars after this rigmarole? The incoming head of state doesn't exactly have a great track record of seeing through on promises to pay and is threatening tariffs against all and sundry.
Anybody with that kind of financing readily available is throwing it at AI and not another social network, no matter how useful it might be for domestic propaganda.
> Not to mention, why would they trust the US to pay tens of billions of dollars after this rigmarole?
Don’t need trust when you have the second most powerful state entity backing you. Corporate America has a complete jammed full history of its interests getting screwed over by foreign entities only for the US government to step in either with military force or some coercive measure resulting in a corrective action. Im sure China is well aware of this playbook and are probably apt to copy it too.
Which makes no sense. Meta wouldn’t sell “meta Uk”, data product, algo and all to a competitor for 20 billion or whatever the number floating around is.
Divesting the US operation would be pointless, the goal of the law is to control the algorithm, and that isn't something that the US office has access to. If they did they could simply be poached like Uber did to Waymo.
It's a distinction without a difference. Musk is effectively an agent of the state, with billions in subsidies he wants to protect, and a Chinese auto market he is desperate to be allowed into.
The CCP would not miss out on taking advantage of the situation and demanding trade concessions for agreeing to sell. US government would absolutely be involved in raising the necessary finance, as banks won't be bending over backwards to lend Musk money for another speculative venture.
* If ByteDance divests their US TikTok operations, they create a new competitor that could potentially out-compete them in other (non-US, non-Chinese) markets.
* Whatever amount of money they get for this divestiture would be much lower than what the business is worth to ByteDance (when your options are sell or shut down, potential buyers will not feel the need to bid high).
* ByteDance's US TikTok operations are certainly of non-financial value to the Chinese government. That value is likely orders of magnitude higher than their financial value to ByteDance. Selling that user base is probably not preferable to shutting down. Influence campaigns are certainly easier to run on a platform you own, but certainly those campaigns are already running on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Why add another platform that they can't control where they have to run influence campaigns?
Why is Tiktok US no longer worth $10 billion or so?
Why wouldn't American investors still want to buy it?
My guess is that American investors would want to buy it, but want the algorithm, but ByteDance is not willing to sell the algorithm out of fear that sharing it would degrade its competitive position outside the US.
In practice, US social networks usually promote content that is aligned with US cultural values and geopolitical interests. Whether this is because the government is actively leaning on them or just because being run by Americans colors them with those values, I don’t know. But the fact is, it’s not a coincidence that TikTok is the main place pro-Palestinian content was allowed to go viral, and it’s likely that changing owners would change the content on TikTok even if the law doesn’t actually require it to do so.
> Whether this is because the government is actively leaning on them or just because being run by Americans colors them with those values, I don’t know
Look up Mitt Romney’s comments where he plainly says they need to ban TikTok because they can’t control the narrative on Israel-Palestine. Narrative being his word.
I'm not defending them here, but the laws in China prevent a sale, so technically they have a duty to uphold China's laws first before upholding their fiduciary responsibility. Same with any American company and following American laws.
The conflicting legal obligations remind me of the Microsoft "safe harbour" case, which is becoming a lot more relevant and still isn't really adequately resolved.
I believe the law mentioned here isn't focused on which organization it is. The law itself basically said you can't export recommendation algorithm. Yes, in the very similar wording as in "you can't export certain GPU chips".
That's a policy decision by the Chinese government. They still have the authority, but the Streisand effect makes blunt censorship counterproductive in an open society. For example, TikTok took down the viral "Uighur makeup tutorial" but quickly reinstated it after the backlash. That backlash couldn't occur in China, but it can in the USA for as long as uncensored outlets exist.
Subtler manipulation still works great, and the opacity of algorithmic content recommendation makes that an ideal instrument. Nobody outside ByteDance knows to what extent the CCP is putting its thumb on that scale already, but they certainly have the power to.
A different account operated by the same user was banned for something relating to an image of bin Laden in a different video. I've been unable to locate that video. I haven't found any reference stating that she praised him. She described her use of that image as satirical, and TikTok itself seems to recognize that (but stands by that ban):
> *While we recognize that this video may have been intended as satire, our policies on this front are currently strict.
In any case, the video in question is the Uighur one. TikTok quickly stated that one was a "human moderation error" and reversed it. My point is irrespective of whether their rules were morally correct or correctly applied, though--whatever those merits, they clearly drew more attention to the topic by censoring here, not less. So it's not surprising they don't apply blunt Chinese-style censorship outside China, since it's counterproductive without Chinese-style control of all major media.
Shares aren’t the sole mechanism for influence though. In Russia there are open sixth floor windows one could fall out of. In China you could disappear to a camp for a few months. Shares are kind of soft in comparison.
This is correct. His power is effectively absolute. Any time his eye focuses on an issue, the issue is resolved to his specification or heads roll and another puppet is appointed to resolve it so.
I spoke a few years back with a tech analyst who specialized in Chinese equities. She herself is a Chinese ex-pat living in the states. She, quite exasperatedly described investing in Chinese equities as "you basically need to guess what Xi is thinking".
One day test prep schools are illegal and immediately shut down. Tech CEOs suddenly became pariahs and started getting carted off to re-education camps. Etc.
You never know what could happen to an executive, company, or sector.
I think that's a major part of the concern. Their first duty is to the Chinese Communist Party. Historically all sources of information in communism have to serve the goals of the party above all else, and this is tightly controlled.
China is technically a multi party democracy, however the CPC does control the PLA (imagine if Republicans controlled the military, and that would be like China).
This is well outside my area of expertise, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But my understanding was that the legal parties are all subservient to the CCP and acknowledge their primacy.
So functionally maybe a little like Albertson's is the only legal party, but if you prefer your region can have a subsidiary of Albertson's like Safeway or Shaw's.
Officially no, effectively yes. It is not like they have meaningful elections, so a lot of power brokering is done behind doors. They do, however, provide minority parties with a quota of seats, although they effectively don't have decision making power (like the governor of a province vs. the CPC chairman of the province).
China is authoritarian no doubt, but clearly there are different forms of authoritarianism. Monarchy isn’t communism either. In principle, communism can’t exist under an authoritarian state, since that would create two classes; you’d be looking at some kind of socialism. Either way, I’d just point out that China has a brutal capitalist market. I feel like that kinda precludes communism.
Communism is whatever someone says it to be, so it isn't a very meaningful label. The term socialism is used a lot more than communism these days, although the party hasn't changed their name.
If you read Marx, communism isn't possible to achieve until after capitalism has run its course, so the way things are in China ATM are perfectly at harmony with that.
Communism has a definition. In the same vein, when someone says “democracy,” you can know roughly what they mean without knowing, eg, is it a representative democracy, is it a republic, does everyone vote together on all issues in a town square. Communism has basic characteristics involving the abolition of private property (not the same as property) and class. China has moved away from socialism to a kind of state capitalism over decades, and I don’t remotely understand why we’d call it communist.
Again, if you read Marx he claims that successful communism comes after capitalistic development. The communist party can take communism as an eventual goal instead of as a necessary truth right now, since the latter has always ended in disaster and the former puts off communism until later. The communist party is most definitely focused on communism as a goal, its goal is turn China to communism when its ready, China is not communist ATM.
Yes, that’s why I said at the outset that the CCP doesn’t run a communist country. That’s also a pretty funny idea; the CCP is cultivating a brutal capitalism to encourage a worker revolution into socialism against, uhh, themselves? By this logic the US is communist.
I think the same way we can talk about monkeys or squirrels. It's a family tree of related ideas. But there's no official checklist of features it has to have.
To give an example for comparison, a lot of people want to say socialism is about workers controlling the means of production. But that doesn't come close to covering all of the things that were called socialism that existed before someone proposed that definition.
With communism it's similar but at least I'm not aware of any one jingle that people are pushing as the one true definition.
But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc. it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.
For what it's worth I'd argue that capitalism is even less well defined and I've heard it used to describe every economic system that's ever existed including all communist countries.
>it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.
That’s not what I did, and I’m not a communist. I’m specifically talking about China because people use the label, deeply incorrectly, to portray them as a threatening other, as though they work in a super different way to us and threaten our way of life.
> But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc.
Im no scholar, but I’m pretty damn certain you can’t have a strong free market, alongside the consequent wealthy capitalists, under communism. Words have meanings, and that’s not what anyone or their mother would think of as communism.
It’s not a hidden statement about anything. China is not communist; communist means something. North Korea isn’t a democratic republic; that also means something. We can go into definitions if you want, but I think this is trivial to observe for China.
Edit: I think the distinction is important because the US has a tendency to label things communist before it goes to war with them, whether cold or hot.
I do not understand this line of argument. On the one hand there is a political decision to ban-or-annex a foreign company, on the other hand the reaction should not be political and in general political implications should not be discussed?
And if anything, if tiktok US is sold it will be way below its actual value, so there are many reasons to resist this apart from the political ones. And I assume they expect they will come to a concession in the first place.
> Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company.
This is not strictly true - when a company leaves a huge market, it is imprudent to leave behind a well-resourced competitor in place. If I were a ByteDance shareholder, I'd hate if it spun off TikTok America LLC, and then having TikTok America compete against ByteDance in Europe and the Rest of the world on an equal technological footing, but perhaps even deeper pockets from American markets.
>Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company.
Would you argue for Tesla or Apple to sell to China? Do you think Musk would divest his China business? The parallels are almost identical
1. Tesla cars collect a huge amount of data.
2. Tesla is already banned from being driven by government officials.
3. Tesla has the best self driving algorithm
4. Chinese cars are already banned in the US
5. China is Tesla's second largest market
6. Tesla is the 3rd largest EV company in China
Would you be surprised if Elon decided to exist China instead of "receiving tens of billions of dollars" from China?
Bytedance is privately held. With a 20% stake by founders and employees.
Divesting according to the bill terms would have them giving away portion of their most precious IP that is the fyp recommendation system. Any reasonable company would refuse to totally divest and create a competitor just because a government said so. Also TikTok makes money for advertizing to the entire world not just the US.
It's not "give away" when they get to charge the market price for it. They presumably also wouldn't inherently even have to split up the company, rather than e.g. do an IPO for the entire global enterprise.
The valuation and acquisition process of the US branch of TikTok would take more than 8 months as outlined by the language of the bill. So it's already forcing them to receive chump change for it. Besides I don't think any company's strategic decisions like this should be solicited by a government. That goes against the free enterprise.
"Free enterprise" is a fantasy. We don't have that, pretty much never had. And I think that's a good thing. Free enterprise/free markets tend to monopolize and prey on workers and consumers.
This has been a possibility for a lot longer than 8 months. Trump was talking about it during his first term more than four years ago. You can take the time to line up buyers even if you don't end up having to sell, but if you have the time and then don't use it, whose fault is that?
> Besides I don't think any company's strategic decisions like this should be solicited by a government. That goes against the free enterprise.
Of course it's not free enterprise. It's a government regulation.
If the US passes a law that says US companies aren't allowed to do business with Russia, that's not free enterprise either. Should those laws be unconstitutional? Maybe, but not any less than this one.
Except now they get to remain the owners and they don’t have to sell at fire sale prices, so it turned out to be the best possible outcome for their shareholders.
I’m not arguing it’s a restriction on TikTok’s speech or bytedance’s speech.
It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law doesn’t fine TikTok. The law fines the people who let me download an application I’ve chosen to use. At $5,000 per instance.
It’s not about TikTok’s rights being violated. It’s about mine, and yours.
No court in the land will agree with your interpretation. The first amendment protects speech, but it doesn't grant you the right to publish that speech wherever you want. If it did then Facebook couldn't ban people from its platform, for example.
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??
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
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.
“ 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
Show me where it is an infringement of your 1st amendment right to a private platform? You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours. There are plenty of other communication channels you can use to express yourself. Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok, just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
> You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours.
So if I wanted to hold a speech how corrupt the government is and then the government passed a law that a PA supplier isn't allowed to sell me a Microphone or speakers, that wouldn't infringe my first amendment right because I don't have a right to a microphone or a stage? (Im not American so I don't have any first amendment rights anyways but for arguments sake.)
It's the PA supplier would be in a better position to argue that their rights are being violated. Especially if a single customer was targeted because of their political views / protected characteristics etc.
The problem with the TikTok scenario is that no specific group is being targeted for restraint. And the government does have the right to regulate trade. E.g. there are embargoed countries, export controls, etc. The fact that you can't sell raw milk across state lines is different from a hypothetical restriction on selling raw milk to, say, people named Todd.
No, it wouldn’t. Congress could pass a law that we’re not going to import microphones and speakers from China. The Constitution explicitly gives them the power to do that. You could then purchase them from any one of a number of other companies and your speech is unaffected.
Look, my point is that the first amendment is in play here and it’s not ridiculous to suggest a free speech analysis is required to hold the law as constitutional or not, which is what the court did and what reasonable people can agree or disagree around to what extent that speech should or shouldn’t be protected. (I personally think, as I stated that the free speech harm is a stronger case from the users who have now been restrained in their ability to use the platform and software distributors who are now restrained from distributing specific software than it is as applied to TikTok where the legislation is content neutral and so the free speech analysis is less relevant.) I’m not even claiming that this law should be found unconstitutional, just that there are free speech issues to adjudicate and the less obvious ones are probably more relevant than the one people are citing where the restraint is content neutral.
Your comment however draws a weird parallel later on though but first let’s take a moment here:
> Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok
That is what the court found but it opens some interesting questions that really do have impacts.
I would bet that you would find a law that says op-eds can only be published in an approved list of venues to be clearly wrong, yet it is equally just determining venue and not content.
As would a law which banned foreign ownership of venues while also introducing a regulatory scheme for domestic ownership stakes of sensitive industries and defined news and commentary as a nationally security sensitive industry. (Which this law essentially does for certain types of apps.)
So at some point a law can be “content neutral” and about access to venue not content but I bet almost any reasonable person would agree it’s an unreasonable restraint.
Now for a situation you draw the above as a parallel with but is very different:
> just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
Bluesky can do whatever they want but if the government were to get involved in defining regulations around which users could use BlueSky… yes absolutely I would expect it to be thrown out on first amendment grounds and expect it’s a significantly stronger case than any of the examples above.
It’s a much weaker and almost irrelevant case when directed at a non-governmental organization in which some folks are using “free speech” as an argument over what entities which are not enjoined from almost any actions may do with their own venues. But yeah, if it was the government telling BlueSky who to ban? You bet that’s got first amendment implications and I’d expect a court to review it under strict scrutiny. (And I wouldn’t expect it to survive.)
> I would bet that you would find a law that says op-eds can only be published in an approved list of venues to be clearly wrong, yet it is equally just determining venue and not content.
That's a poor analogy, because allowlists and blocklists are not the same thing and do not have the same effects. The government only allowing a list of certain approved media outlets would be an obvious 1A infringement. The government blocking certain media outlets is not.
It’s not meant to say they’re the same thing, it’s meant to demonstrate clearly that venue restrictions even when content neutral can impose restrictions on speech and those restrictions must be balanced and scrutinized appropriately under our system.
I think that’s a huge difference, yes. And about what apps my phone is able to download, and what servers it is able to access.
Another huge difference is broadcasting is about usage of a shared resource and has always had regulations on who is allowed to do what. They don’t ban RT from setting up their own venue or printing a newspaper. RT and other outlets are able to operate in the US and people are able to chose to watch them.
Graffiti laws are also evaluated under heightened scrutiny due to free speech implications. A law having an impact on free speech does not mean it never holds, but it must be analyzed in that context. Here’s an example: https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
> Graffiti laws are also evaluated under heightened scrutiny due to free speech implications
Graffiti bans are unquestionably constitutional. Graffiti laws that regulate the content are not.
Telling people where they can speak is precedented, legal and necessary. Telling people what they can say is against the principles of free speech; the government doing so is illegal.
I get that you believe that's what's happening, but I can't imagine any US court agreeing with you.
The law (and the US constitution) does not guarantee any particular platform for your speech. It just guarantees that you can speak, and courts have interpreted that to mean that you need to have some reasonable platform, and that laws can't put an unreasonable burden on your ability to speak on some platform.
As an aside:
> Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law does not target internet providers at all. They are not required to block traffic to *.tiktok.com or any of their IP addresses.
> It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
You are being ridiculous now. None of those are forms of speech.
And restrictions on your ability to perform certain actions is literally what being in a society is about. If you don't like it then find another society. Just like you can find another ISP, place to publish your video or platform to use apps you want to use.
Whether you think it’s ridiculous or not, restrictions on distribution of software being a violation of US free speech rights has been an established part of US case law for around three decades now: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
I'm skeptical that Bernstein vs DOJ would apply, to a [foreign-controlled] company that is not publishing their algorithm, on the idea that allowing their [trade-secret] code to control how hundreds of millions of people interact with each other is somehow free speech on ByteDance's part.
The foreign-controlled part in particular implicates Congress's obvious and explicit power to regulate international trade, and it seems obvious to me that there would be something less than strict scrutiny applied to alleged violations of the 1A when that Congressional power is in play.
Yes, most of the court felt intermediate scrutiny was the appropriate standard in part because of the reasons you outlined.
(I also agree that this is a different case, I only point to Bernstein because it is a clear part of case law which states that software distribution is and can be a free speech issue and restraints on it would be expected to be evaluated with some level of scrutiny.)
I also feel you are being a bit absurdist fwiw. I am know the be a principled devils advocate sometimes, so I'm reading you as that, otherwise your position as an American makes very little sense to me
The justices on the Supreme Court analyzed the constitutionality of this law under a free speech basis. The Per Curiam opinion of the court suggested the correct standard was intermediate scrutiny as an abridgment of free speech. Justice Sotomayor suggested in her concurrence that strict scrutiny (the highest standard) was appropriate.
They concluded that these regulations were okay at those levels of scrutiny, but it is not absurd or ridiculous to analyze these as forms of speech, and indeed, our courts do so.
That said, just because there is a conflict with freedom of speech doesn’t prevent all government regulation, it just means the laws involved must pass an elevated level of scrutiny. That applies here, for multiple reasons, and with multiple parties.
Source code you can argue is a form of speech versus a packaged product.
Not that the case is relevant because restrictions on the availability of products is well established under the law. I can’t just buy nuclear weapons for example.
>"If you don't like it then find another society. "
Isn't use of any non-violent means to advocate one's belief to change the society is the whole point of the democracy? Your point is rather very totalitarian.
I’m not, for what it’s worth. I’m arguing that I think the free speech case is stronger for the users and software distributors who are enjoined from the platform or distributing certain software applications than it is for the platform whose ownership but not content or speech is being directly regulated. (The law doesn’t fine TikTok it fines the people providing services to TikTok. Their speech rights may be more relevant in this case.)
I also see why people are interpreting my comment to mean that because it’s a restriction on my speech it’s not constitutional because that’s how people usually act on the Internet. But I don’t and didn’t. What I said was it was a restriction on my speech and I believe that’s more of interesting case than the restriction on TikTok’s speech. The ramification of that is that the courts would adjudicate the free speech restriction at an appropriate scrutiny level and determine whether that restriction is allowable. As we all know, some restrictions are allowable and constitutional. Others aren’t.
It’s not unreasonable, wild, or strange to point out that there’s a restriction on speech here, and to point out that conflict needed to be resolved to determine constitutionality.
Most are handled at the district level, if the court felt there was no legal issue at play, they would have denied cert. Their opinion did end up being per curiam which suggests the court feels clearly about the case, but does not suggest they never felt there was an issue worth arguing.
> What I said was it was a restriction on my speech
I don't agree that it is, though. The restriction is on where you cannot put your speech[0], not on the speech itself. If there was nowhere that you could put your speech (or if the available avenues became much much much smaller in reach), then I would say that your speech is being restricted.
But that's not the case here. You can publish that same speech on YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and a host of others where you can reach more or less the same audience you can reach on TikTok.
You also mention elsewhere about not being permitted to download a particular app onto your phone (and/or that a service provider isn't allowed to provide it to you). That just isn't a free-speech issue at all. And besides, if you have an Android phone, you absolutely still can install the TikTok app on the phone, because Android allows sideloading. If you have an iPhone and can't sideload, then your beef is with Apple, not with the US government. Beyond that, www.tiktok.com still works just fine, and will still work fine even if/when it ends up hosted on infra owned by non-US companies.
[0] Note that I did not say it is a restriction on where you can put your speech; it is a specific restriction on where you cannot, which I think is an important distinction.
It’s a restriction either way. Whether it’s a reasonable one or one that meets elevated scrutiny is a separate second question. Your points are arguing that question and are reasonable context for that debate.
The government isn’t banning TikTok, the law only requires a change in ownership. The current owners are choosing to performatively shut down in an attempt to bully their way through that requirement
The US need not restrict any of your speech. You’re not directly communicating with any of TikTok’s users when you post to it, TikTok is. In the Internet age, even apparent one-way communication is handshakes upon handshakes. Consider this: You’re free to send whatever messages you want to ByteDance. They’re just not allowed to reply (or have anyone reply on their behalf). The app is a useless binary blob if it can’t set up a TLS connection.
> Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company.
> Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company
This is only true if you assume the US is the only market that matters. But TikTok is very much an international phenomenon, and selling would likely harm the company far more than a couple billion. Firstly it would give another company everything they need to run a global competitor to TikTok, including software, infrastructure and userbase. Secondly it might encourage other countries to also force TikTok to sell.
Giving in here would be the beginning of the end of TikTok and could well be argued to be a violation of the company's fiduciary duty to shareholders. It would be the ultimate version of chasing short-term gains by selling the long-term future.
Interesting position. I wonder if another country could just force Musk to divest himself of Twitter in the same way. Could solve a lot of headaches that way. Maybe the EU could force the issue.
Depends on the political power of the entity and it's existing laws.
In your example, Musk could stop the app in the EU, much like TT is/was doing.
With this said, is the EU law written like the long standing US laws that give the TT law the power it has? If they have to enact new laws that would conflict with its member states wishes/dealings with other nations, expect it go to nowhere.
Possibly they could force him to divest from whatever legal entity Twitter operates under in that country, or force Twitter to stop operating in that country, but they would have no authority over the US corporation.
It won't. It would be fantastic if the EU banned Meta or X. Instead they're suddenly scared of continuing to fine them for their endless illegal data harvesting and gatekeeping to cozy up to Trump.
That's somewhat of a myth that lets these companies off easy, there's no ruling that says you have to maximize profit at all costs, or at all to an extent. The sole motivator is greed.
The former does not imply the latter. Look at Bezos, he spent years re-investing in Amazon to provide long-term financial benefits to his shareholders. Pressure for short-term gains comes from shareholders on Wall St, it’s not a fundamental property of shareholders.
It's a complete myth used by the greedy to justify corporate greed. The only way someone would ever be succesfully prosecuted for this is if they'd clearly intentionally crash the company. Go do a search, you won't find a single other prosecution.
I really hope this changes your mindset. The number go up mentality is purely a result of avarice from those enacting it, it has 0 to do with any laws, it's all personal greed.
"Shut down in the US" not shut down everywhere, if I'm not mistaken. It also doesn't seem like an obvious violation of their fiduciary duty. The eventual growth in all other jurisdictions could easily be claimed to be worth more than the sale price, and it could also be argued that selling to US holders would harm the platform internationally.
>"Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders"
This does not make sense, it is like saying that requiring bezos to sell his newspapers is not a free speech issue (I might or might not support such action as I am not a free speech absolutist)
Because seems insane to think that only because U.S says that Bytedance need to be divest or be banned, that any company will prefer to divest... And if the company doesn't do it, it's because of "hidden reasons"
everything… the world does not revolve solely around USA. the EU should ban all US social media companies too unless they are sold to one of EU countries, that makes sense, right?
You joke, but with the power these companies have over peoples minds (enough people to sway elections) it is a reality we may be going towards; each power constellation a different social media universe.
TikTok has the power to sway any election how they want. The data available to them about what reels sways what people in what direction is immense. The only question is if they are doing it.
In 20 years I expect either democracy to vanish, or algorithmic social media to be widely banned, or control over algorithmic social media to be viewed more like control over nuclear weapons...
This is like saying that closing all churches of a religion is not a big deal as the people can perfectly pray by themselves. (Also since they can pray in their head why not making that religion's prayers illegal to speak aloud)
If you used to assemble at a public park, and the city closes the park entirely to turn it into something else, does that violate your right to assemble too?
Even if it was the town square, if the property went from public to private ownership property ownership laws trump your free speech laws. You cannot come on to my properly and say whatever you want, more so you can't say it's not trespassing because of freedom of speech.
If the city sold the public property with the specific intent of having a private entity stop protected speech they were powerless to stop then yes, it would be a free speech issue
I'm not buying this drivel - the company stands to make way more than one rushed and limited buyout would garner.
Your argument is a false dichotomy, and it's made in bad faith. You argue that they should have taken a 10B pay day, meanwhile they are alive today and arguable worth over 100B.
That would be if they were American, even if they were not Chinese, not every country puts shareholders capitalism above everything else a company is suppose to decide upon.
But those running corporations are fiduciaries - the have a legal and ethical obligation to their shareholders. If those shareholders want to not maximize profits and have other objectives, then that's totally fine and then the managements obligations are to those aims of the shareholders.
> pretending that the TikTok law is a speech issue
A lot of folks here are saying that the TT ban had nothing to do with free speech. A couple of indirect rhetorical questions that might be relevant to help illuminate opinions about TT:
1. If there were a single newspaper (in the pre-internet era) that developed and printed a lot of reporting with a particular political outlook and was the home of many columnists known for being the premier thinkers with that outlook, and a law were passed that had nothing to do with the content but had the effect of shutting down that paper, and only that paper, would this be a speech issue?
2. If a political rally were assembling to petition for redress of their grievances, and a law were passed that told them they could say what they wanted but the rally was only allowed to occur in a specific field 30 miles outside the city and 3 miles from the nearest paved road, would this be a speech issue?
3. Given that deadtree-books-in-physical-libraries are not the primary point of reference for most people anymore, if you wanted to block access to certain kinds of information and/or make a statement about doing so, what action would you take in the 21st century to do the equivalent of a book burning? And would this be a speech issue?
There are obvious and easy things you can point out about how the TT law is different from each of those three scenarios, don't @ me about that. But it seems to me that most people who are serious (or, publicly serious, which is a little different) about supporting the TT ban give reasons for it that would be inconsistent with their answers to one or more of those three questions.
(1) Doesn't match the situation at all, because the law didn't require the paper to shutdown - it required a foreign company to divest so that it is US-owned, and the paper could continue operations as normal.
That's a pretty substantial difference.
(2) Also doesn't match the situation, there is no requirement that TikTok restrict the reach or audience of their content in any way AFAIK.
(3) The situation is more akin to "foreign government owns the local library, and can decide based on the identity of the person walking in which books the person is allowed to see and check out" - seems obviously problematic at least /if they do that/
As many have pointed out it is not only titok's free that is in question, but rather the free speech of its users.
As an analogy you could imagine that all the people in the cases above are neonazi pedos and you might conclude that they do not deserve free speech, but the point of the parent is that in all of those cases the free speech of the people was being infringed upon (the question is whether that is justified or not)
Which of these examples includes the parts about foreign control? This is the primary issue as far I was aware. The chinese state does not have first amendment protections because they are not american citizens.
Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company. But ByteDance’s allegiance isn’t to their shareholders.