Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
(cnbc.com)832 points by kjhughes 12 hours ago
832 points by kjhughes 12 hours ago
Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.
There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts.
Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".
Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.
So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.
It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.
>And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat.
I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.
But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.
> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.
If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP.
But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.
This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that.
"Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"
What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?
That's what the question of strict scrutiny vs. intermediate scrutiny vs. rational basis is about. The courts would have to decide the appropriate level of scrutiny given the legal context and then apply that to the law as written.
Your hypothetical clearly implicates the Times' speech, so intermediate scrutiny at least would be applied, requiring that the law serve an important governmental purpose. I think that would be a difficult argument for the government to make, especially if the law was selective about which kinds of media institutions could and could not have any foreign ownership in general. The TikTok law is much more specific.
Except this isn't a law against any foreign owner, just specifically a foreign owner that is essentially the #1 geopolitical adversary of the US.
A large part of the US-China relationship is zero-sum. If America loses, china wins, and vice versa. That relationship is not the same for, say, the US-France relationship.
I think the equivalent would be if New York Times is somehow owned by Tencent and given that the Chinese government uses golden shares to control private companies. In that case, I think it's fair game to force NYT to divest or force them to shutdown.
What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"?
This already exists in some ways. Foreign companies are not allowed to own American broadcasters. That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a (dual?) American citizen when he wanted to own Fox television stations in the United States.
Vaguely like that.
Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.
The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.
This is completely incorrect. Divestment in this context means the selling of an asset by an organization. You cannot "divest" in this sense from a government. That's nonsensical.
The equivalent in Facebook (Meta) terms would be China requiring Facebook, if it wished to continue operations in China, to sell the Chinese Facebook product to a Chinese or other, as to be defined by China, non-American entity. In some sense this is already the case.
Not really. There is no analogous concept in the US of the CCP's relationship with large companies.
1) TikTok was already theoretically a US company, but the strings were being pulled by the parent org in China.
2) US and China regulatory burdens and rule of law aren't equivalent, and I'm not going to grant that equivalency.
> There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law
It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.
You could say that about all the American tech companies that are banned in China. They just have to comply with Chinese law and will be unbanned. For example, Google, unlike Microsoft/Apple, chose to withdraw from China rather than comply with Chinese law.
Selling TikTok means handing over the source code for the algorithm.
I can see, say, Coca-Cola refusing to sell a local subsidiary if they would be forced to hand over their recipe.
It doesn’t label ccp. It denigrates four countries as foreign adversaries. And then allows the president to remove any company located in those adversaries.
Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.
it's more specifically ByteDance must divest. The effects that happen because of a divestment by ByteDance, such as TikTok losing access to "the algorithm", are just incidental. The oral arguments for the case are on YouTube and are worth a listen.
>owever, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.
80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?
And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.
It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.
The West told plenty of its companies, through public pressure or laws, that they have to divest from Russia, and they did. Rationally they recognized that selling their assets is financially more lucrative than just closing their operations and making 0$. Now why would an corporation which alleges to not be controlled by a government refuse to sell and forego billions in income, even though it is against the interest of their shareholders?
from what I know the bids that have been put in place are just for the US operations and there are some bids that dont include the algo as a part of the deal.
quote from tiktok's webiste https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-myths-vs-facts/: ``` Myth: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is Chinese owned.
Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity. ```
> "de facto controlled by CCP"
Where is the evidence for this?
The Chinese government directly owns shares of ByteDance. It has representatives of the government working in the company ensuring it takes the "correct political direction": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance#Management
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/12/5-things-to-know-abo...
I found the first three alone quite compelling:
> ByteDance is Closely Connected to China’s Military-Industrial Complex
> ByteDance is Bound by Chinese State Surveillance Laws
> ByteDance’s Board is Beholden to Beijing
As evidenced that TikTok would rather shut down than continue to print money in the US
It's common knowledge that the CCP has a lot of control over various companies registered there: https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/reassessing-role...
The above is based on a linked research paper but the numbers may actually be much higher as it can't really account for proxy ownership, various CCP committees influencing these companies, state banks providing loans only for companies that play ball, etc.
And even if it wouldn't directly have fingers in the pie, it's an authoritarian state, and it always has de-facto control over anything it decides to control. The state can always just waltz in like a mafia boss: "nice outfit you have here, would be a shame if anything were to happen to it..."
While more democratic nations are not entirely flawless on this, the separation of powers, independent judiciary, and free press do offer protections against this, as does having a general culture where these sort of things aren't accepted. Again, not flawless 100% foolproof protections, but in general it does work reasonably well.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/tech/tiktok-bytedance-china-o...
> However, like most other Chinese companies, ByteDance is legally compelled to establish an in-house Communist Party committee composed of employees who are party members.
> In 2018, China amended its National Intelligence Law, which requires any organization or citizen to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work. > That means ByteDance is legally bound to help with gathering intelligence.
I would say yes.
Where is the evidence for this?
"Another way the Chinese government could assert leverage over a deal involving TikTok would be by exercising its “golden share” in a unit of ByteDance. In such an arrangement, the Chinese government buys a small portion of a company’s equity in exchange for a seat on its board and veto power over certain company decisions.
In 2021, an investment fund controlled by a state-owned entity established by a Chinese internet regulator took a 1 percent stake in a ByteDance subsidiary and appointed a director to its board."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/17/us/tiktok-ban-suprem...
Committees representing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party exist inside of most major corporations in China. It would not be possible to operate a company like ByteDance without acquiescing to government interference
https://www.seafarerfunds.com/prevailing-winds/party-committ...
You can read about it here: https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/are-private-chinese-companie...
You can read the full "Opinion on Strengthening the United Front Work of the Private Economy in the New Era" here[1] in English, though I suspect you don't need the translation.
Excerpts from what the Party says openly:
> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important means by which the Party’s leadership over the private economy is manifested.
> This will help continuously strengthen the Party’s leadership over the private economy, bring the majority of private economy practitioners closer to the Party
> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important part of the development and improvement of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.
> Educate and guide private economy practitioners to arm their minds and guide their practice with Xi Jinping’s Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; maintain a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee on political positions, political directions, political principles, and political roads; and always be politically sensible. Further strengthen the Party building work of private enterprises and sincerely give full play to the role of Party organizations (党组织) as battle fortresses and to the vanguard and exemplary role of Party members.
> Enhance ideological guidance: Guide private economy practitioners to increase their awareness of self-discipline; build a strong line of ideological and moral defense; strictly regulate their own words and actions
[1]: https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publi...
China's economic reform didn't quite embrace capitalism the same way many other places did. Their businesses still inherently do not have the same managerial independence that many have come to expect as normal in the rest of the world. While Chinese businesses are allowed to have some private control, the government still exercises control over "private" businesses when they decide they are important or large enough.
Imagine if all Fortune 500 companies were required to have Trump appointees on their boards. That would sound crazy here, but that's how things still work in China.
The divestiture clause is just a red herring -- sure, that sounds perfectly fine. But you can substitute it (in the future) with anything.
In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security
All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)
> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."
The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).
Like such cannot be enforced for example against foreign radio stations or print publications.
Then how do court justify that it stands in the case of an app.
As I understand, a print publication can't have a business entity in the US if it's owned by a foreign adversary. Given that, an American could still travel to the foreign country themselves and bring an issue back. That would be similar to side loading apps.
In order to comply with the law, Apple and Google cannot distribute the app because it is deemed to be unlawfully owned by a foreign adversary; that's the ban. But anyone who wants to get it through other means can still do so. Presuming that's how it works, it doesn't seem to be logically different from radio/print media.
> Like such cannot be enforced for example against foreign radio stations or print publications.
If the law and acts calling for their divestiture were deemed "content neutral" then they could. But an app, with algorithmic profiling, delivery, and data capture, for the purposes of modeling and influence, is not the same as a radio station or a publication, so it would probably not be easy or even possible to the SC's standards to write a content neutral law in that way. But they have deemed that with apps like TikTok, when done so carefully, it is possible and divestiture can be enforced neutral of content.
We don't need to stick our head in the sand and act like TikTok is the same as a print publication.
The SC's decision, and Gorsuch's opinion in particular, is carefully written to not fundamentally rewrite the First Amendment, I'd urge you to read it.
The replies here seem slightly off base. The Court acknowledges that 1s amm. free speech issues are at play. A law can regulate non-expressive activity (corporate ownership) while still burdening expressive activity, which is the case here. In such instances, the Court grants Congress more leeway compared to laws explicitly targeting speech. It checks that (1) the govt has an important interest unrelated to speech (it does), and (2) the law burdens no more speech than necessary (arguable, but not obviously wrong)
My reading of it is they didn't bother to take the motivation of the law into account (suppression of speech), and only took the law "as written" to decide.
> We need not decide whether that exclusion is content based. The question be- fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend- ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First Amendment rights...
they talk more about the motivations of the law in part D.
The "exclusion" referred to in this quote is not the exclusion of tiktok. The court is responding to one of the arguments that tiktok made. Certain types of websites are excluded from the law, and (tiktok says) if you have to look at what kind of website it is, then obviously you're discriminating based on content.
the court is saying that this would be an argument that this law is unconstitutional, period. That's a very hard thing to prove because you need to show that the law is bad in all contexts, and to whoever it applies to, very hard. So tiktok is not trying to prove that, that's not how they challenged the law - instead tiktok is trying to prove something much more limited, ie that the law is bad when applied to tiktok. It's an "as-applied" challenge. In which case, the argument about looking at other websites is irrelevant, we already know we're looking at tiktok. As the opinion says "the exclusion is not within the scope of [Tiktok's] as-applied challenge"
The quote you posted is about if the exclusion of platforms "whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews" means the law is content-based, but the Court is saying that provision is irrelevant because TikTok brought an "as-applied" challenge (and not a facial one) [0] and that provision doesn't change how it applies to them. So they are looking at the parts of the law (and the congressional record supporting them) which actually cause TikTok to be subject to the qualified divestiture.
You mean Sottomayor and likely Gorsuch acknowledge the 1st amendment issues at play. The rest just assume it without deciding.
> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.
The first amendment doesn't apply here. You can say whatever you want anywhere else on the internet. You can print what you want anywhere you want. You can distribute what you want anywhere you want. Bytedance refused to sell TikTok so it's being shut down. They could divest, but they didn't.
> first amendment doesn't apply here
It absolutely does. (It’s in the opinion.)
It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.
That is not the point of the First Ammendment, it is that Government cannot stop anyone from saying/printing/dissemination of content.
So question if government has power to do so.
Can they ban RT? Or even the BBC, if the government found it wise to do so?
>But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.
There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.
Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.
Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.
Speech and immigration are completely different areas of the law, there's no useful legal point of comparison in this context.
The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.
So for example, the law technically doesn't ban TikTok at all, but rather mandates divestiture. However, the timeline wasn't realistic to manage such a divestiture, so the court recognized that the law is effectively a ban. The effect is what matters.
Similarly, the law provides a mechanism for the President to designate any application meeting a set of criteria a "foreign adversary controlled application". The court recognizes that the government has a compelling interest in restricting foreign adversaries from unregulated access to the data of US citizens, and the law services that interest.
The law represents a restriction on freedom of expression, TikTok is banned, but the law also represents a compelling government interest. To determine the winner of these two motivations, the court has established various thresholds a law must overcome. The relevant threshold in this case was determined to be Intermediate Scrutiny, and a compelling government interest is sufficient to overcome intermediate scrutiny.
> The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.
Let's agree to disagree.
To oversimplify:
You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.
BUT:
The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.
IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.
If these FCC rules were designed specifically with the intent to suppress speech of certain parties, they could be found in violation of your first amendment rights if challenged. IMO the ruling does not bother to examine whether the motivation of drafting the Act was to suppress speech.
The FCC doesn't make rules based on who owns the telephone though.
Actually, they kind of do.
> US bans sale of Huawei, ZTE tech amid security fears
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450
This was an FCC rule
This case was not about speech. It was about a vehicle for speech having a high risk of being used for espionage and PSYOPS. If TikTok was the only vehicle available for people to post on the internet, then maybe the First Amendment argument would hold water.
This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.
Creating and distributing in the USA, sure. That is allowed. This is why the government isn't regulating Chinese content on Instagram, for example.
The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.
This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.
Because this is not about the first amendment? This just happens to be a company that runs a social network. Congress regulates commerce with foreign nations and made the decision, as it has in many other cases, that a foreign nation can not be the beneficial owner of TikTok. TikTok then made no effort to divest, giving away the game if you want, and predictably lost this challenge.
Well, yes, because that is the only hope TikTok had - to claim it was targeted because of the speech on TikTok, and not because this is a very boring case of regulating commerce, which as said is well established and has lots of precedent. And their expensive lawyers made it happen, when they should have been looking for buyers. And then SCOTUS unanimously said nah.
Like you can just go read the opinion. It goes into detail on exactly this question and is easy to understand.
Print media is different. It is much more exhausting to read a newspaper because critical thinking circuits are automatically engaged.
You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.
The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.
It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.
Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.
As far as first ammendment it does make no difference if it is print or voice or online service.
TikTok 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.
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?
>the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech
It is, and the court acknowledged that editorial control is protected speech.
The ruling was made based on data privacy ground, not First Amendment Speech ground.
"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?
Newspaper is probably a bad example because the first ammendment specifically calls out protecting the press
> 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.
No, because "the press" isn't just "the editors and columnists".
The entire notion that there's a free speech angle here is a disingenuous red herring by Tik Tok to muddy the waters.
Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.
This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.
This is false. There is absolutely content on TikTok critical of the US, Israel, western businesses, etc that is boosted by TikTok’s algorithm and effectively censored or hidden on many American-owned social networks,
First amendment rights is the only argument that I agree with keeping TikTok alive. However if there is proof that China is manipulating the algorithm to feed the worst manipulative content to Americans then I do think there’s a national security concern here.
Yes there are. The First Amendment is limited by compelling government interest, which (in practice) means it can be fairly arbitrarily by SCOTUS.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/post/what-the-first-amendmen...
This is an especially superficial take, sure the Constitution says nothing about national security but reality sure does...
Any person that has ever gotten a security clearance has given up some of their first amendment rights to do it and if they talk about the wrong thing to the wrong person they will absolutely go to jail.
And as always the classic example of free speech being limited still stands. Go yell FIRE in a crowded movie and see how your dumbass 1st amendment argument keeps you out of jail.
Bit of a non-sequitor here but the classic example of yelling 'Fire' in a theater has me thinking about public safety. Obviously there have been many crowd-crush related injuries and fatalities throughout history. But we've also come a long way since the 1800's or 1900's with fire drills, emergency exits, etc.
It almost seems like any hazard or danger from a false alarm (intentional or otherwise) should be the liability of the owners or operators of a property for unsafe infrastructure or improper safety briefing.
Anyway, I don't expect that to appear as a major legal issue, given this is primarily used as a rhetorical example.
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech".
First ammendment protections have no National security caveats.
That is completely false. There are many exceptions to the first amendment which the court has decided don't abridge the freedom of speech.
A classic example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_president_of_t...
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.