Federal TikTok ban violates First Amendment free speech rights
Earlier this year, my company, BASEDPolitics, filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its pending TikTok ban.
The ban is a tremendous attack on the free speech rights of content creators, including us, who use this app to voice our opinions and help educate people about prominent public policies and political ideologies. Obviously, the ban would impose a drastic barrier to our work.
The government claims the ban serves national security interests. But the Supreme Court has ruled that national security could only justify suppressing speech to address an immediate threat, and the Biden administration hasn’t shown that TikTok poses such a threat.
The government also argues that the ban is necessary to stop the spread of ideas that are against the U.S. government’s interests. But that’s not a justification: The point of the First Amendment is to stop the government from censoring speech that it thinks goes against its interests. In fact, the Supreme Court specifically ruled, decades ago, that people have the right to receive foreign communist propaganda.
People not only have a right to speak freely, but they also have a right to hear and consume the thoughts and speech of others holding a variety of political opinions. And on TikTok, the speech at issue is mostly not the speech of the Chinese government but the speech of other Americans. That means the TikTok ban is not only an attack on my free speech rights as an activist and content creator, but it’s also an attack on the free speech rights of the 170 million people who use this platform to hear information.
Read Hannah’s entire column at the Washington Examiner
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We definitely haven't heard the last of the foreign influence debate, despite so many of the election-tampering allegations proving false or underwhelming. Two things that defy originalist interpretation are the intelligence-gathering ability of apps, and their personal targeting ability. Adults are mostly propagandized by clickbait that appeals to their innate sensibilities, but children can be much more susceptible to messaging of all kinds. Some new regs will be in demand, no matter who is running the machinery of government.