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I still don't quite understand the free speech issue with banning one particular foreign media outlet or platform. Banning TikTok would do nothing to hinder Am

I still don't quite understand the free speech issue with banning one particular foreign media outlet or platform. Banning TikTok would do nothing to hinder Americans' ability to say (almost) whatever they want without fear of government retribution. Anything you would have said on TikTok can still be said on Facebook for example, or your own website.

frollogaston 1y ago
Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions. The ban is the government retribution. They also pressure Facebook etc to hide or downrank what they want.
- stevenAthompson 1y ago
  >The ban is the government retribution. No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens. See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    This is all true, but it's not the reason for the ban. Sen. Romney admitted it. The sponsor Rep. Gallagher and other lawmakers pretty much said it too.
  - guappa 1y ago
    What would banning 1 single app do when all of them do the same shit? How does it help anyone to be spied by 1 less app?
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      If Americans are not ideologically opposed to being spied upon by corporations, there is no disconnect here. Americans have strongly signaled, through politics and actions, that they do not give a fuck about their privacy or information security, and ask any voter and they'll repeat some bullshit about "I don't care" or "nothing to hide". But Americans do not want to be spied upon by a literal adversarial government which sets up police stations in other countries. I don't want to be spied upon by my country, but currently Republicans want to use the force of the federal government to police and punish wrongthink, and Obama was a true believer in the US spy state, so they didn't exactly try to remove it. It's hard to get America to undo a policy that was sold as "Kill the terrorists in our country" when those same voters have, 20 years later, enthusiastically supported another round of "kill the brown and muslims because they are terrorists" and want to deport people for tweets.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        The popularity of TikTok in the US suggests Americans don't care about the adversarial govt spying either.
    - stevenAthompson 1y ago
      > What would banning 1 single app do when all of them do the same shit? That feels like a facetious question. You may as well also ask, "Why we bother arresting the worst murderers when there will still be other murderers?"
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions It’s about ownership, not speech. If Bytedance refuses to change TikTok’s ownership, it gets banned for that reason. (Same way a foreign radio station would get banned for violating our ownership rules.)
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    The bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app the US president has chosen to target. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text#HB5568894B1D94B058BC0D19DB8093F39 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        The bill doesn't say anything about speech, but that was the reason it became law. Singling out TikTok made it convenient.
basilgohar 1y ago
TikTok has different censorship than Meta and Google platforms. More news about the genocide Palestine reached people through TikTok than other platforms that actively banned activitists and journalists reporting on Israel's warcrimes over the past 18 months.
School-Cotton 1y ago
TikTok is the main place pro-Palestine viewpoints went viral. I don't know whether this is because of the demographics of users, or because US platforms were putting their thumb on the scale, or because TikTok was putting its thumb on the scale, or just randomly, but it is in fact the case. So that's one quite mainstream opinion that would be suppressed if the government banned TikTok. No, you wouldn't be arrested for posting pro-Palestine stuff to Facebook (at least not under Biden...) but that's not the only way for the government to curtail speech.
- ycombobreaker 1y ago
  If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else? The whole thing is unverifiable because we have no test/control, but it seems implausible that the platform was the only avenue for this particular speech.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    The companies themselves have free speech. It doesn't really matter how those viewpoints ended up highly-ranked on TikTok, it's their right to choose what they want to display, same with Facebook. And given what happened here, I don't expect Facebook to allow this stuff high-up even if they wanted to before. Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content Kind of quaint in 2025.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    > If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.
ricochet11 1y ago
if they can ban something then everyone else gets worried of being banned and everyone plays it safe.
guelo 1y ago
TikTok used to be one of the few big platforms that didn't censor Israel criticism, though that has changed since Trump imperially overrode the law and unbanned them. It's insane the levels of 1st amendment violation and corruption that is OK now.
- dylan604 1y ago
  First amendment violations have always been accepted as long as they were inline with current administration. Since the administration has changed, so has the direction of those violations which just makes it appear like it is new now.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  Any one company moderating speech isn't a first amendment violation though. The first amendment is entirely focused on the right to sleek freely without risk of government intervention, it says nothing of private corporation interventions.
  - guelo 1y ago
    The point is Trump extorted Tiktok into censoring speech he doesn't like in exchange for unbannig them.
  - guappa 1y ago
    If the government is telling companies what to do, how do you claim there's no government intervention? Do you also think it's impossible to convict anyone for murder because it was the bullet killing the victim, not the person holding the gun?
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
If you're going to tamper with US elections, you should at least have to spend USD to do so?
- _heimdall 1y ago
  So are you saying that the free speech issue related to a TikTok ban is based only on what currency is used?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I apologize for not addressing your comment directly. The free speech issue related to a TikTok ban has to do with limiting the audiences that Americans are allowed to engage with. It's not about what they might say, but about what they might hear. The message it sends is: > You're allowed whatever speech you want, so long as we have influence over the speakers and microphones that you use to do so. That's going to have a chilling effect on what actually gets said. I was using "using USD" as a stand-in for "using platforms run by people we can reliably bully into tampering with your speech if it becomes problematic," and also to suggest a bit of corruption on the side, which seems likely given that Zuckerberg and Trump are now buddies.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      I don't like the ban, or the fact that the "TikTok bill" ended up granting broad new powers to the executive branch. I just read it a bit differently with regards to free speech. When it comes to limiting the audience we can engage with, that would require a ban on talking to specific people rather than on a specific platform. Anyone that I may have engaged with on TikTok can still be engaged with on other platforms. The fact that many of the biggest social media platforms are based in the US and that we saw clear evidence of both the US government's and the plstforms' willingness to collude is a huge problem. To me that's a separate issue than the TikTok ban, though they are in the same arena I suppose.
gosub100 1y ago
I don't defend the practice, but it's a lot easier to hide "adversarial" bot armies on a foreign social network. We have bot armies on US social networks but they are well known and controlled by US interests.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  What do not armies have to do with the first amendment though? My right to free speech isn't impeded by someone else standing up a bunch of bots online.
  - toynbee_cunt 1y ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - gosub100 1y ago
    You can free-speech on any platforms that are not found to be hostile to the US, such as possessing the capability for foreign nations to influence US elections by coordinating bots to spread misinformation. Again that's the argument, I don't really agree with it because we do it ourselves. But that's a separate issue.
dylan604 1y ago
Banning TikTok would be so much more effective than any of the other products. The people that would see the same content on Facebook is a different audience than what is using TikTok. Planting those seeds of confusion on the younger TikTok audience will have a much better ROI than sowing those oats with the old farts left reading FB feeds.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  The first amendment doesn't have anything to do with reach OE impact though. The whole point is that a citizen can say whatever they want without the government stopping them, it has nothing to do with how many people can hear it or where it can be said.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    You seem to be under the impression that banning TikTok is about freedom of speech. That's why you're confused. Freedom of speech is just the PR spin.
vkou 1y ago
> I still don't quite understand the free speech issue with banning one particular foreign media outlet or platform. Half of America's exports is media to foreign countries, you're opening a can of worms.

frollogaston 1y ago

Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions. The ban is the government retribution. They also pressure Facebook etc to hide or downrank what they want.

stevenAthompson 1y ago
>The ban is the government retribution. No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens. See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  This is all true, but it's not the reason for the ban. Sen. Romney admitted it. The sponsor Rep. Gallagher and other lawmakers pretty much said it too.
- guappa 1y ago
  What would banning 1 single app do when all of them do the same shit? How does it help anyone to be spied by 1 less app?
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    If Americans are not ideologically opposed to being spied upon by corporations, there is no disconnect here. Americans have strongly signaled, through politics and actions, that they do not give a fuck about their privacy or information security, and ask any voter and they'll repeat some bullshit about "I don't care" or "nothing to hide". But Americans do not want to be spied upon by a literal adversarial government which sets up police stations in other countries. I don't want to be spied upon by my country, but currently Republicans want to use the force of the federal government to police and punish wrongthink, and Obama was a true believer in the US spy state, so they didn't exactly try to remove it. It's hard to get America to undo a policy that was sold as "Kill the terrorists in our country" when those same voters have, 20 years later, enthusiastically supported another round of "kill the brown and muslims because they are terrorists" and want to deport people for tweets.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      The popularity of TikTok in the US suggests Americans don't care about the adversarial govt spying either.
  - stevenAthompson 1y ago
    > What would banning 1 single app do when all of them do the same shit? That feels like a facetious question. You may as well also ask, "Why we bother arresting the worst murderers when there will still be other murderers?"
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions It’s about ownership, not speech. If Bytedance refuses to change TikTok’s ownership, it gets banned for that reason. (Same way a foreign radio station would get banned for violating our ownership rules.)
- frollogaston 1y ago
  The bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app the US president has chosen to target. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text#HB5568894B1D94B058BC0D19DB8093F39 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      The bill doesn't say anything about speech, but that was the reason it became law. Singling out TikTok made it convenient.

basilgohar 1y ago

TikTok has different censorship than Meta and Google platforms. More news about the genocide Palestine reached people through TikTok than other platforms that actively banned activitists and journalists reporting on Israel's warcrimes over the past 18 months.

School-Cotton 1y ago

TikTok is the main place pro-Palestine viewpoints went viral. I don't know whether this is because of the demographics of users, or because US platforms were putting their thumb on the scale, or because TikTok was putting its thumb on the scale, or just randomly, but it is in fact the case. So that's one quite mainstream opinion that would be suppressed if the government banned TikTok. No, you wouldn't be arrested for posting pro-Palestine stuff to Facebook (at least not under Biden...) but that's not the only way for the government to curtail speech.

ycombobreaker 1y ago
If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else? The whole thing is unverifiable because we have no test/control, but it seems implausible that the platform was the only avenue for this particular speech.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  The companies themselves have free speech. It doesn't really matter how those viewpoints ended up highly-ranked on TikTok, it's their right to choose what they want to display, same with Facebook. And given what happened here, I don't expect Facebook to allow this stuff high-up even if they wanted to before. Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content Kind of quaint in 2025.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.

ricochet11 1y ago

if they can ban something then everyone else gets worried of being banned and everyone plays it safe.

guelo 1y ago

TikTok used to be one of the few big platforms that didn't censor Israel criticism, though that has changed since Trump imperially overrode the law and unbanned them. It's insane the levels of 1st amendment violation and corruption that is OK now.

dylan604 1y ago
First amendment violations have always been accepted as long as they were inline with current administration. Since the administration has changed, so has the direction of those violations which just makes it appear like it is new now.
_heimdall 1y ago
Any one company moderating speech isn't a first amendment violation though. The first amendment is entirely focused on the right to sleek freely without risk of government intervention, it says nothing of private corporation interventions.
- guelo 1y ago
  The point is Trump extorted Tiktok into censoring speech he doesn't like in exchange for unbannig them.
- guappa 1y ago
  If the government is telling companies what to do, how do you claim there's no government intervention? Do you also think it's impossible to convict anyone for murder because it was the bullet killing the victim, not the person holding the gun?

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

If you're going to tamper with US elections, you should at least have to spend USD to do so?

_heimdall 1y ago
So are you saying that the free speech issue related to a TikTok ban is based only on what currency is used?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I apologize for not addressing your comment directly. The free speech issue related to a TikTok ban has to do with limiting the audiences that Americans are allowed to engage with. It's not about what they might say, but about what they might hear. The message it sends is: > You're allowed whatever speech you want, so long as we have influence over the speakers and microphones that you use to do so. That's going to have a chilling effect on what actually gets said. I was using "using USD" as a stand-in for "using platforms run by people we can reliably bully into tampering with your speech if it becomes problematic," and also to suggest a bit of corruption on the side, which seems likely given that Zuckerberg and Trump are now buddies.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    I don't like the ban, or the fact that the "TikTok bill" ended up granting broad new powers to the executive branch. I just read it a bit differently with regards to free speech. When it comes to limiting the audience we can engage with, that would require a ban on talking to specific people rather than on a specific platform. Anyone that I may have engaged with on TikTok can still be engaged with on other platforms. The fact that many of the biggest social media platforms are based in the US and that we saw clear evidence of both the US government's and the plstforms' willingness to collude is a huge problem. To me that's a separate issue than the TikTok ban, though they are in the same arena I suppose.

gosub100 1y ago

I don't defend the practice, but it's a lot easier to hide "adversarial" bot armies on a foreign social network. We have bot armies on US social networks but they are well known and controlled by US interests.

_heimdall 1y ago
What do not armies have to do with the first amendment though? My right to free speech isn't impeded by someone else standing up a bunch of bots online.
- toynbee_cunt 1y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gosub100 1y ago
  You can free-speech on any platforms that are not found to be hostile to the US, such as possessing the capability for foreign nations to influence US elections by coordinating bots to spread misinformation. Again that's the argument, I don't really agree with it because we do it ourselves. But that's a separate issue.

dylan604 1y ago

Banning TikTok would be so much more effective than any of the other products. The people that would see the same content on Facebook is a different audience than what is using TikTok. Planting those seeds of confusion on the younger TikTok audience will have a much better ROI than sowing those oats with the old farts left reading FB feeds.

_heimdall 1y ago
The first amendment doesn't have anything to do with reach OE impact though. The whole point is that a citizen can say whatever they want without the government stopping them, it has nothing to do with how many people can hear it or where it can be said.
- dylan604 1y ago
  You seem to be under the impression that banning TikTok is about freedom of speech. That's why you're confused. Freedom of speech is just the PR spin.

vkou 1y ago

> I still don't quite understand the free speech issue with banning one particular foreign media outlet or platform. Half of America's exports is media to foreign countries, you're opening a can of worms.