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It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems
by gorgoiler 2y ago
It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems to make more sense. It’s analogous to a ban on paper, pens, or bullhorns. I can be sympathetic to the idea that, for some people, one particular proprietary app is their main tool for expression, even if that’s hardly ideal.
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
- ranger_danger 2y agoif youtube was being banned instead for the same reason (pretend it was owned by ByteDance), would you feel the same way? what about any other website/platform that you like? what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
- ipython 2y agoWhat’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp... On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
- anramon 2y agoChina doesn't pretend to be a democracy, so as they don't are nor pretend to be a democracy the rest of us should abandon democracy? Should be stop begin democratic because China isn't?
- ipython 2y agoI’m not advocating that we abandon democracy. To use your argument the other way around, why should we treat china as a democracy as it doesn’t pretend to be one? They don’t allow our businesses to operate on an equal footing there, so why afford them easy access to our markets? In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.
- fastball 2y agoChina absolutely does pretend to be a democracy. They call it a "whole-process democracy".
- ipython 2y agoTIL. In 2021 the ccp released a white paper titled “China: democracy that works” https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202112/04/content_WS61aae34fc6d0df57f98e6098.html https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202112/04/cont... https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+Works.pdf https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+W...
- gorgoiler 2y agoYes, that’s a good way to think about it. What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share. I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
- ReptileMan 2y agoThe first amendment at its core is - if someone wants to say something and someone wants to listen to the first one saying it - the government has no right to prevent or interfere with the process. Banning the app trough which information flows is interference. And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform. tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
- mantas 2y agoWhat’s next, pitting a fence around some field is also freedom-of-speech issue since some people may want to talk in that field?