Comment by throwaway199956
Comment by throwaway199956 14 hours ago
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.
Comment by throwaway199956 14 hours ago
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.
Soviet Life Magazine for example was printed and sold in the US by the Soviet Embassy.
That makes me curious about the details; it's worth noting that the Soviet Embassy's physical location would be Soviet sovereign land that is licensed to them by the US so long as they are allowed to maintain an embassy presence. If people go onto the embassy to buy the magazine, they are literally traveling to a foreign country to buy it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Life
According to Wikipedia (yes I am linking directly to it and not a source, sorry to all of my teachers.) it seems that the magazines were distributed by news stands in many major USA cities, you did not need to go to the Embassy. But it also go on to note that this was because of an inter-governmental agreement which muddies the water. E.g. "Was it because of the agreement or because of the constitution and we just _said_ it was because of the agreement."
It might have been allowed under a bilateral cultural agreement between the US and the USSR.
I don't really know the exact legal situation surrounding this, but the viewpoint that in the past Soviet propaganda could be freely distributed in the US a rather curious viewpoint. The US government spent decades chasing down (alleged) communists, both using hard power and soft power, and many were effectively silenced, and many more never even dared to speak up.
So whatever the exact legal situation was the time, a free speech utopia where even enemies of the US had free reign did not exist. De-facto free speech was significantly more restricted on this topic.
That something is allowed doesn't mean that it's guaranteed in the constitution.
In that particular case, it was a result of an agreement with the Soviet government that allowed us to publish Amerika magazine in the USSR.
> 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.
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.