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It isn't clear to me how this is a first amendment issue. If the federals are concerned, maybe they should actually do something instead of progressing into ex
by bmitc 3y ago
It isn't clear to me how this is a first amendment issue.
If the federals are concerned, maybe they should actually do something instead of progressing into extremism and leaving it completely to states to rule but then stepping in when they do? Social media is a wild west of unregulated harm being bestowed upon children and adults. In addition, all of them are indeed national security threats.
The district judge's explanations seem naive. And TikTok's reasoning shows misunderstanding as well. The first amendment guarantees free speech, not the transmission of free speech through the medium of TikTok.
- pavlov 3y agoTikTok Inc. is a US corporation. You can't make a law that limits the speech of just one company, any more than you can make a law that targets a single individual by name in general. So the restrictions would have to be more generic yet narrow enough that they only hit TikTok in practice. The administration of Florida had this problem recently when they wanted to punish Disney for criticism, but couldn't write that into law. They ended up with a law that includes a set of criteria which combined leave Disney as the only affected party. In this case, they'd presumably want to come up with criteria that cover TikTok but exclude Meta, Google and X. It's not very easy because the actual products and audiences are very similar. The foreign ownership angle is the one they should be looking at, IMO.
- benreesman 3y agoI’m not weighing in on the right or wrong of people using TikTok or where, but let’s not fuck around on ByteDance being the social media arm of the PRC? I did years at IG, we knew who we were competing with.
- pavlov 3y agoSure. I have no illusions about TikTok. But constitutionally they can't be targeted just because "everyone knows who they are." It's an American corporation on paper, employs thousands of people in the US, and must be treated equally. AFAIK, the legal structure includes several parent companies in the Caymans (TikTok Inc. in America is owned by TikTok Ltd in the Caymans, which is owned by ByteDance also registered in the Caymans but controlled by Chinese interests - maybe via some Singapore routing too, I forget). Legislators probably need to do their homework to find the smoking gun in that structure.
- dist-epoch 3y agoFree speech also means that the gov can't dictate what apps I run on my phone.
- bmitc 3y agoNo it doesn't, and they already do.