alt Hacker NewsTikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.
The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.
Replies
That last sentence needs to be taught in every civics class.
They could have a week of the teacher repeating that single sentence for the entire period
"You can drive anywhere you like..." as they take away the super major highways owned by foreign adversaries and leave the ones bending the knee to USA national interests.
It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?
I'm not bent out of shape over the tiktok ban, but you've got me wondering. Do newspapers do speech? Or is it the editors and columnists who do speech? Could a newspaper be shut down by congress if the law didn't say anything about the editors and columnists, merely denying them the means of distribution?
Agreed. TikTok allows people to speak into the app, and to receive speech, but the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech -- it's societal scale hormone regulation and should be controlled for the health of the national body. It's wild that so many people are up in arms about TikTok when it is a Chinese app that is banned in China, where apps are heavily restricted.
For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?