Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

aclu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 146 posts

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#71

Post by _bin_ »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #49
kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

The authors Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey seem to think that the rule of law and advocating for consistent ruling on constitutionality will have an effect. If I’ve learned anything about how the Supreme Court works, it’s that this is a political calculation, not a legal one. The outcomes are decided first, and then jurisprudence is employed to substantiate them — not the other way around.

>The outcomes are decided first, and then jurisprudence is employed to substantiate them — not the other way around. I think this is the thing people don't get. Right or left, Democrat or Republican, it just doesn't matter anymore. You have nine of the best legal minds in the country, supposedly, and they constantly vote along party lines. There is no way that happens if the law is actually being respected.

This is just not true. If you examine recent terms, many cases are decided unanimously and others have judges voting across the aisle. Roberts has been incredibly cautious to avoid this happening and has managed the docket specifically to avoid it. The majority on Bostock, where Gorsuch wrote the opinion, is a pretty good example of this. A ton of rulings have been very narrowly tailored specifically to avoid setting precedent, favoring standing or juridsiction more than a tough interpretation of con law.

You might appreciate Roberts' '24 year-end report on the federal judiciary: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2024year-en...

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#72

Post by paxys »

Social media platforms hosted in the USA are voluntarily bending to the President's will.

Social media platforms hosted outside the USA are going to be banned, because national security.

People may not realize or acknowledge it, but we are in the very last days of "free speech" on the internet.

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#73

Post by Hizonner »

otterley wrote: post #58
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pointless misdirection. "I'll burn down your house unless you sell it to me for $1" See, that's not arson, because you always had a way out.

This is a terrible analogy: 1/Selling something doesn't destroy it 2/You don't want to destroy it because you want to fetch a high price for it 3/Nobody's offering $1 for TikTok, and nobody expects ByteDance to accept $1 for it 4/A fair market price would make ByteDance whole

You think forced rushed sales don't depress market prices?

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#75

Post by tines »

otterley wrote: post #29
breadwinner wrote: post #9

TikTok is NOT being banned. TikTok can continue unmodified if it transfers ownership to anyone outside China.

The ACLU is staffed with extremely competent First Amendment attorneys and yet they seem to be intentionally muddying the water about this. As a 1A scholar (and ACLU supporter) myself, I find it extremely frustrating.

I'm not so sure the ACLU is staffed with competent First Amendment attorneys any more. I've read a few articles citing Ira Glasser as being disappointed in the direction the modern ACLU is moving.

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#76

Post by Salgat »

ccvannorman wrote: post #31

If I had children aged 7-17 and felt China was intentionally nudging them via algorithmic suggestions away from STEM and toward vapidness, and if I was unable to control their access to it, I guess I might appreciate that my government had banned it. But, as others have mentioned, it sets a dangerous precedent. If nothing else, this attempted ban has raised national awareness about the negative impacts of TikTok. Wha…

The forced divestment is for national security reasons. Bytedance, as a Chinese company, is required by law (Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China) to provide full data access to the Chinese government on request, and they are compelled not to reveal when this occurs. Since this is done through legitimate channels (on Bytedance's side), this won't even be caught with an audit. So you have a situation where an app installed on half of America's phones shares all its data with China, along with any potential changes the government recommends for influencing the content.

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#78

Post by paxys »

mempko wrote: post #50
paxys wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade. If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not. The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.

Except your analogy is flawed. Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US. It's not like the Tiktok's themselves are all Chinese made.

> Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US

The entire argument is about their algorithm. They are not written and published in the USA if someone in China controls what goes in them.

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#79

Post by cma »

psunavy03 wrote: post #26

TikTok is not being banned. TikTok is being required to sell to a non-Chinese stakeholder in order to mitigate the national security threat of it being indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. These are not the same thing, and it's depressing how vulnerable people seem to be to propaganda anymore. No one can even read a legal brief or a law.

Microsoft is not being banned from China. China just asks that Microsoft sell itself to a non-American company or they will be banned (but it's not a ban).

Re: Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional. The Supreme Court Must Step In

#80

Post by Hizonner »

bilbo0s wrote: post #35
ranger_danger wrote: post #7

> If the Supreme Court allows the government to shut down an entire platform on such a flimsy evidentiary record, it would set a disturbing precedent for future government restrictions on online speech. Something something PATRIOT Act.

The patriot act was supported by everyone when it became law. In fact, one senator had the unmitigated gall to ask the rest of congress, “but what about Constitutional freedoms?”. So the rest of us promptly removed him from office and replaced him with a more law and order type guy. That was pretty much the only resistance to that law at the time. All that to say, you get what you vote for. And we’ve been voting very…

> The patriot act was supported by everyone when it became law.

I was at the time a US citizen, and I thought it was moronic authoritarian bullshit. It was basically written by taking every obnoxious proposal that various cops and spies had been having trouble getting passed, shoving them all in one document, and rushing it through unexamined. In response to essentially no surprising new information, at that.

... and lots of other people said that.

I'll give you that the majority of you supported it, and that the people in Congress (who tend to have a personality type with a certain kind of blindness) supported it. "Everyone" didn't support it.

Post reply on HN