I'm sorry but I have yet to see a single person who makes this point admit that it's a form of speech suppression. This is classic First Amendment precedent. Just because the speaker is someone you don't like, or its content is anti-American (or what have you), doesn't mean it's not protected speech.
What is being prohibited is an adversarial government having complete control over an entity that can decide which speech is delivered to which specific audience.
We can either strive for an educated populace that can identify propaganda or we use propaganda ourselves on ourselves. Propaganda is winning.
Your solution is to open the floodgates, allowing all manner of military/intel-grade psychological manipulation, bots, AI, etc. to be unleashed on our population, but try to educate the entire population to become professionals at identifying and resisting these tactics?
Seems absurd on its face. It's strange to see someone trying to make that sound like the reasonable option.
The simplest case for banning TikTok is simple reciprocity. China is no longer a market that needs the level of protectionism they currently have to develop. The second best is data privacy. Just a shame they won't apply the same to US companies yet. And then an additional reason is the one that's being used currently - risk of foreign influence. You'd hate to not ban it "because it hasn't happened yet" just for it to happen in the future. China keeping out US apps seems to have worked out great for their local industry, I'm hardly convinced it wouldn't also be a good thing for US citizens. And with the foreign-country thing tossing Constitutional issues out the window, go nuts.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Constitution does not consider Freedom of Speech a positive right, one that can be granted to some but not others. It is a negative right against the government. It's about as broad and as absolute as you can get. This is why the right also applies to legal entities (eg: companies), even foreign legal entities. It is not limited to citizens, it is not limited to persons.
The idea that a foreign, adversarial government would have a Constitutional right to propagandize our citizenry at-scale is obviously not consistent with the societal good (or the "common defense", for that matter), so is outside of the First Amendment's scope/intent.
If you want to make an argument that it's not happening, that's one thing. But, your assertions about TikTok having some blanket "right" here are false.
"Apple has a first amendment right to be able to list any app it wants, regardless of source" seems like the only claim you could make. The Lamont case doesn't directly apply since the government isn't an intermediary between Apple and ByteDance saying "are you SURREEEE you want to get this app from them?" And the existence of restrictions on what you can send/receive through the mail make it clear that Lamont isn't a blanket "you can't regulate messages between people" restriction.
So is "hey Apple, don't list things that meet that criteria" different than "hey UPS, don't send things that meet this other criteria"?
AFAICT the Supreme Court didn't really consider it from this angle anyway and just looked at it as a regulation on corporate control, which also seems completely legitimate. Can the US gov't say "certain things require US-person-owned/controlled companies?" They do for other things already.
For someone who believes in the concept of free speech, the fact that US constitutional rights to free speech in practice almost certainly do not protect overseas business interests is really an embarrassing corner case. Even if you do genuinely consider national and foreign actors to be different kinds of entity, so that it could be ethically sound to protect one and not the other, there's a simple technical reason for constantly the distinction to be artificial: Free speech protection can be gained merely by funnelling the speech through an intermediary US citizen.
This case shows that there is a first amendment right to receive.
