6 ms·

Doesn't first ammendment protect even that. Propaganda of other countries are legal under first ammendment. Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate

by throwaway199956 3y ago

Doesn't first ammendment protect even that. Propaganda of other countries are legal under first ammendment. Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate which apps one can or cannot use on one's device. Also even at the hight of cold war, Soviet Life magazine was published and disseminated widely in the US.

zachmu 3y ago
A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.
- throwaway199956 3y ago
  Listening to foreign radio stations on shortwave and listening their propaganda is also not illegal in the US.
- brookst 3y ago
  I’m not usually a slippery slope person, but if we’re outlawing content based on who owns the creator or transmitter, things get ugly quick.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    A rule that hostile nations can’t own communication platforms in your country isn’t a slippery slope. The US is widely against even having its own government own communication platforms.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - philwelch 3y ago
    “On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in...)
  - zachmu 3y ago
    It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that. The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right. Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended. We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.
  - mannerheim 3y ago
    The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.
    - chii 3y ago
      that's because ISIS is a terrorist organization. So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.
      - mannerheim 3y ago
        That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch. When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them. Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests. It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence. The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.
  - parthianshotgun 3y ago
    Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.
- murderfs 3y ago
  Well, we do that too: https://www.usagm.gov/2022/03/05/usagm-condemns-kremlins-increasing-censorship-responds-to-a-surge-in-demand-for-reporting-from-its-networks/ https://www.usagm.gov/2022/03/05/usagm-condemns-kremlins-inc...
cangeroo 3y ago
Do foreign nationals have the same rights as Americans? Foreign companies shouldn't have the same protections. And in many countries, locally-operating subsidiaries are required to have majority ownership by citizens, partly to prevent foreign influence.
- takinola 3y ago
  Foreign nationals in the US have the same rights (but not privileges) as American citizens.
  - impossiblefork 3y ago
    Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US. I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.
    - takinola 3y ago
      The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go. Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious. [1] Source: 8th Amendment
      - impossiblefork 3y ago
        No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever. There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US. There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.
flakeoil 3y ago
Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate which bomber planes can or cannot enter our country?
- agency 3y ago
  Great point - flying a bomber plane over a country is protected speech.
  - parthianshotgun 3y ago
    Please indicate your sarcasm for I fear parent might take you literally
cogman10 3y ago
> Doesn't first ammendment protect even that. Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights. This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment. US laws are geographically bound.
- brookst 3y ago
  First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).
amou234 3y ago
What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3] People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there. [1] However, since 2022, China has amplified its purchase of cheaper Russian oil after the West hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-top-oil-supplier-2023-russia-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-top-oil-suppli... [2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/europe-ukraine-gunpowder-shortage/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/... [3] https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-russia-alignment-cooperation-ukraine-war-military-supplies-putin-xi-jinpin/ https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-russia-alignment-co...
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Even if that's true, if we suspend our constitutional rights to conduct a war, then what's the point in having them? I thought they were inalienable. Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings. The reason kinda doesn't matter when rights are on the line.
  - amou234 3y ago
    Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does. [1]https://www.military.com/history/6-times-martial-law-was-declared-and-constitution-suspended-united-states.html https://www.military.com/history/6-times-martial-law-was-dec... [2]https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 [3] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-prisoners-for-transplants-forced-organ-harvesting-in-china/ https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-... [3]
msabalau 3y ago
If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down. On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade. It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  The law will have little impact except to reacquaint children with web browsers, VPNs and side loading.
  - zachmu 3y ago
    You are drastically overestimating the capabilities and determination of tiktok users
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jdkee 3y ago
"The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact." -Justice Roberth H. Jackson
ecoquant 3y ago
[flagged]

zachmu 3y ago

A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.

throwaway199956 3y ago
Listening to foreign radio stations on shortwave and listening their propaganda is also not illegal in the US.
brookst 3y ago
I’m not usually a slippery slope person, but if we’re outlawing content based on who owns the creator or transmitter, things get ugly quick.
- true_religion 3y ago
  A rule that hostile nations can’t own communication platforms in your country isn’t a slippery slope. The US is widely against even having its own government own communication platforms.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- philwelch 3y ago
  “On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in...)
- zachmu 3y ago
  It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that. The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right. Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended. We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.
- mannerheim 3y ago
  The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.
  - chii 3y ago
    that's because ISIS is a terrorist organization. So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.
    - mannerheim 3y ago
      That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.
hayst4ck 3y ago
Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch. When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them. Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests. It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence. The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.
- parthianshotgun 3y ago
  Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.
murderfs 3y ago
Well, we do that too: https://www.usagm.gov/2022/03/05/usagm-condemns-kremlins-increasing-censorship-responds-to-a-surge-in-demand-for-reporting-from-its-networks/ https://www.usagm.gov/2022/03/05/usagm-condemns-kremlins-inc...

cangeroo 3y ago

Do foreign nationals have the same rights as Americans? Foreign companies shouldn't have the same protections. And in many countries, locally-operating subsidiaries are required to have majority ownership by citizens, partly to prevent foreign influence.

takinola 3y ago
Foreign nationals in the US have the same rights (but not privileges) as American citizens.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US. I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.
  - takinola 3y ago
    The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go. Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious. [1] Source: 8th Amendment
    - impossiblefork 3y ago
      No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever. There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US. There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.

flakeoil 3y ago

Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate which bomber planes can or cannot enter our country?

agency 3y ago
Great point - flying a bomber plane over a country is protected speech.
- parthianshotgun 3y ago
  Please indicate your sarcasm for I fear parent might take you literally

cogman10 3y ago

> Doesn't first ammendment protect even that. Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights. This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment. US laws are geographically bound.

brookst 3y ago
First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).

amou234 3y ago

What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3] People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there. [1] However, since 2022, China has amplified its purchase of cheaper Russian oil after the West hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-top-oil-supplier-2023-russia-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-top-oil-suppli... [2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/europe-ukraine-gunpowder-shortage/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/... [3] https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-russia-alignment-cooperation-ukraine-war-military-supplies-putin-xi-jinpin/ https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-russia-alignment-co...

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Even if that's true, if we suspend our constitutional rights to conduct a war, then what's the point in having them? I thought they were inalienable. Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings. The reason kinda doesn't matter when rights are on the line.
- amou234 3y ago
  Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does. [1]https://www.military.com/history/6-times-martial-law-was-declared-and-constitution-suspended-united-states.html https://www.military.com/history/6-times-martial-law-was-dec... [2]https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 [3] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-prisoners-for-transplants-forced-organ-harvesting-in-china/ https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-... [3]

msabalau 3y ago

If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down. On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade. It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.

datavirtue 3y ago
The law will have little impact except to reacquaint children with web browsers, VPNs and side loading.
- zachmu 3y ago
  You are drastically overestimating the capabilities and determination of tiktok users
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jdkee 3y ago

"The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact." -Justice Roberth H. Jackson

ecoquant 3y ago

[flagged]