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You're mostly right, but I do not trust this court to consider precedent, or even the law

If they want to truly go after tiktok we’re gonna need data privacy bills and oversight that affects ALL social media platforms.

You mean like the GDPR? Oh the US can absolutely not have that. Big Brother will have a fit!

The speech is protected, but foreign influence is not.

The US has a very long history of preventing and restricting foreign control of national media. That said, this has traditionally been applied to television and radio, not new media.

The thought being, people can say whatever they want, but if a foreign adversary has control over the flow of key information channels, that is a national security risk.

Lamont v Postmaster General was decided the way it was because it required Dr. Lamont to make a positive and OFFICIAL act in order to receive something through a U.S. Government service.

"We conclude that the Act as construed and applied is unconstitutional because it requires an official act (viz., returning the reply card) as a limitation on the unfettered exercise of the addressee's First Amendment rights. "

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act requires no official (meaning related to Government) act on the part of the user. A secondary, but still important, consideration for SCOTUS in that case was that the U.S. Mail was an official Government body, that also doesn't apply.

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act may still be struck down but Lamont v Postmaster General is IMO a poor case to use for comparison.

Exactly. I don't care about tiktok (I'm more concerned with the parts of this legislation) but this'll be interesting. The bad news is that if tiktok wins this, other corporations will definitely start up with some new shenanigans

It won't happen, but imagine how satisfying it would be if TikTok was the domino that led to Citizens United being overturned

I mean, I don't know if I would say "interesting turn of events" per se. This was entirely expected, to the point where every major news outlet was reporting on the day the ban was announced that TikTok was likely to contest it in court.

I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but the basic premise seems solid. US has that whole ‘corporations are people’ shtick going on

Sure, and the US Government is quite able to ban people from the country as well.

Not really, this was always coming. Any time new regulations effect a corporation, they sue. Sometimes it's just to establish a more reasonable timeframe to make the necessary changes to stay in regulation, sometimes it's to upturn the entire law. This was pretty much always Step 2. What's real interesting is TikTok's refusal to sell, which tells me that they think they have a very solid court case.

Corporations are only people when it comes to rights they can abuse.

If TikTok winning this means we treat corporations more like people, does that mean we can start charging them with murder and suing them when they infringe on our rights?

But freedom of speech is an US right, how does banning a Chinese company even if they are a person violate free speech? They would be a Chinese citizen with the rights given in their country so no free speech. Just don't get the play they are trying to make here.

It’s interesting because technically the content on TikTok is the speech of the users and TikTok is just processing it. It’s not actually their “speech”. Does that mean anything? Are they considered press? Same thing. It’s the content of the users.

The power of the government to force the breakup, dissolution, or divestment of corporate entities is the basis of US antitrust law, and is well established.

Unless of course the monopoly holder is an american corporation. Then it’s a good monopoly. We’re living in the next gilded age simply because people “forgot” monopolies are bad and those laws remain unused against giants like google, amazon, meta and many many more.

They literally said they want tiktok gone cz they can't control the narrative: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/israel-al-jazeera-us-tiktok-ban

I imagine that our (U.S.) government's case resides primarily on the premise that the state may exercise the ability to force divestment of a company with foreign ownership.

These powers are granted by the National Defense Authorization Act which seeks to prevent imminent national and private security vulnerabilities being exploited by foreign adversaries and agents; the actors here would be specifically the CCP and their intelligence and military apparatus' shell companies and PMCs.

The precedents set by U.S. Anti-Trust laws support their position, but the primary argument in the state's defense are the powers granted by the NDAA.

I'm only speculating.

We should not throw out our rights, just because China doesn't have those same rights.

China should be the example of a bad way to monitor the internet, not the end goal.

Its just a ploy to avoid any sort of reasonable privacy regulation. Tiktok doesn't do anything that facebook, reddit, instagram, tumbler, twitter etc don't do.

That won't fight propaganda, because propaganda doesn't have to have any basis in reality. It can be nothing but straw men and Potemkin villages. You can literally lie, and it's going to take far, far more effort to debunk the lie than it would be to simply prevent the lie from propagating in the first place.

wouldn't it be funny if tiktok ended up overturning citizens united. infinitesimally small chance of it happening, but it would be fucking hilarious.

Is the lie that it's not the first time?

And we know why they are censoring. They don't like that certain politics are being spread.