Comment by jmholla

Comment by jmholla 2 months ago

> Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply.

The Constitution does not place limits on which people are protected by it (you don't have to be a citizen for it to apply as the founders were looking to limit the powers of their government not their citizens). And with the expansion of those protections to corporations through Citizens United, I'd be surprised if a court found that `company + foreign != person + foreign` when they've decided `company == person`. (Well not surprised by this Court.)

> The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.

The rest of your comment still stands right in my eyes. National Security has often been used as a means to bypass many things enshrined by the Constitution.

umanwizard 2 months ago

The court has never determined that corporations are people, that’s a completely unfounded meme.

What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.

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iterance 2 months ago

Eh? Unless otherwise specified, corporations satisfy the definition of a person across all federal laws per 1 USC §1, which reads: "the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals"
That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.

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hwillis 2 months ago

Totally beside the point. Verbatim from Citizens United:
> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.

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- IgorPartola 2 months ago
  
  That is not nearly the same thing as saying that they are people. Just that when it comes to this particular right, the way it is applied is not functionally different. That’s like saying that because corporations pay taxes they are also people.
  
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  hwillis 2 months ago
  
  Yes. Whether or not they are "people" is irrelevant. They have the same rights to free speech. You are nitpicking.
  
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  IgorPartola 2 months ago
  
  Law is all about nitpicking.
  The point you and others try to make is that corporations are people as a result of CU and so other human rights apply to them. This is backwards. SCOTUS and lower courts basically established that free speech applies to corporations same as individuals. But it did not establish their personhood. This is exactly equivalent to saying that a corporation has to pay taxes like a person. It does not make it a person.
  So what people get wrong is they say “if a corporation is a person then it gets to do X”. Thats incorrect, nobody except talking heads on TV called it a person. Similarly “if a corporation has the right to free speech it has the right to do X” is incorrect. Having one right does not confer all rights. Again think of it as the idea of corporations get to pay taxes. People get to pay taxes. This did not make corporations people and did not confer any other rights onto corporations.
  
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IgorPartola 2 months ago

Ugh. CU doesn’t state that corporations are people. They can’t vote or own guns or get married or divorced. They can’t be legal guardians to children or pay income tax. They aren’t entitled to Social Security benefits and their coverage for health insurance may be denied for preexisting conditions. What CU said is that collectively people can use company resources to exercise their right to free speech and established the concept of super PACs.

This isn’t to say that it was the right decision (certainly seems to have done some very bad things). But “corporations are people” is a lay person talking point, not an actual legal doctrine. Therefore you can’t just apply it to other cases because there is nothing to apply.

You are correct that free speech isn’t limited by your citizenship status.

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wombatpm 2 months ago

Isn’t Alphabet and other tech companies technically Irish owned? Doesn’t Saudi Arabia own a chunk of Twitter? Seemed like the whole ownership ship justification is a cheap canard.

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