[continued from previous message]   
      
   dubious ties to a foreign nation, a carefully crafted decision permitting   
   the US government to bar foreign ownership of major media platforms would   
   not alter the existing balance of power between private citizens and their   
   government.   
      
   What is the First Amendment supposed to accomplish?   
   It’s easy to get bogged down in the weeds of First Amendment doctrine   
   while thinking about the TikTok case. TikTok argues that this case should   
   be viewed no differently than if the government had targeted Bezos’s   
   ownership of the Washington Post due to a dispute over domestic politics,   
   and thus that the federal law should receive the most skeptical level of   
   constitutional scrutiny. Srinivasan has argued that the government’s long   
   history of barring foreign control of US communications infrastructure   
   calls for a less skeptical approach (known as “intermediate scrutiny”).   
   The Justice Department, in a brief submitted last month, argues that the   
   federal law “does not implicate the First Amendment” at all, claiming that   
   a foreign company like ByteDance has “no First Amendment rights” to begin   
   with.   
      
   Rather than dive too deep into these weeds, however, it’s probably best to   
   view the TikTok case through the lens of first principles. One of the   
   primary purposes of the First Amendment is to prevent the government, with   
   its vast array of law enforcement officers who could arrest or kill anyone   
   who antagonizes political leaders, from using its power to control public   
   opinion.   
      
   In this sense, the government is unlike any private company or individual,   
   no matter how powerful that private entity may be, because only the   
   government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As the Court   
   recently reaffirmed in Moody v. Netchoice (2024), “on the spectrum of   
   dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the   
   government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its   
   own conception of speech nirvana.”   
      
   RelatedThe Supreme Court will decide if the government can seize control   
   of YouTube and Twitter   
   Netchoice squarely presented the question of who should prevail when   
   elected officials believe that a powerful media company is using its   
   influence over public discourse unwisely. That case repudiated a Texas law   
   that would have seized control of content moderation at social media   
   platforms like YouTube or Twitter, due to concerns that, in Texas Gov.   
   Greg Abbott’s words, those platforms were attempting to “silence   
   conservative viewpoints and ideas.”   
      
   Whatever you think of Abbott’s specific concerns, a reasonable lawmaker   
   quite easily could conclude that media executives like Mark Zuckerberg or   
   Elon Musk wield too much control over political discourse in the United   
   States. Nor is it hard to understand why such a lawmaker might want to   
   reduce their influence.   
      
   Nevertheless, Netchoice reaffirmed the longstanding First Amendment rule   
   that, no matter how much anyone might be offended by a media company’s   
   decisions, the solution cannot come from the government. Elected officials   
   have too much of a conflict of interest when they attempt to shape   
   political discourse. And the government’s ability to arrest or kill   
   dissidents makes it different in kind from even the wealthiest   
   corporations.   
      
   But TikTok involves an entirely different question than Netchoice. The   
   Court’s First Amendment cases largely rest on the proposition that our   
   government must not be allowed certain powers because governments are   
   inherently capable of overpowering private companies and citizens unless   
   the government is legally restrained. But what happens when the US   
   government wants to check the authority of another country’s government —   
   a foreign adversary with its own array of law enforcement and military   
   personnel at its command?   
      
   Lest there be any doubt, the First Amendment does not give the government   
   unlimited power to suppress ideas that originate overseas. In Lamont v.   
   Postmaster General (1965), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a   
   law restricting mail deemed to be “communist political propaganda” that   
   originated from a foreign country.   
      
   But it’s one thing for the Soviet Union to mail copies of The Communist   
   Manifesto to individual Americans in the 1960s. It’s another thing   
   altogether for a foreign adversary to potentially be able to control a   
   massive communications platform with 170 million American users, nearly   
   all of whom will be completely oblivious to whether the Chinese government   
   is collecting their data or manipulating which content they see.   
      
   The latter situation, as Srinivasan argues, is far closer to the more-   
   than-a-century-old ban on foreign control of US radio stations than it is   
   to the law struck down in Lamont. And these sorts of bans on foreign   
   control of US communications infrastructure have not historically been   
   understood to violate the First Amendment. Nor, as the Radio Act of 1912   
   demonstrates, are they anything new.   
      
   All of which is a long way of saying that a well-drafted, narrowly   
   tailored Supreme Court opinion permitting the government to ban foreign   
   ownership of major US communications platforms — and nothing else — would   
   not be a constitutional earthquake. Indeed, such an opinion would merely   
   maintain the status quo.   
      
      
   --   
   November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look   
   forward to America being great again.   
      
   The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and   
   eradicated.   
      
   We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that   
   stupid people won't be offended.   
      
   Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem.  It has none.   
      
   Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden   
   fiasco, President Trump.   
      
   Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the   
   The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood   
   queer liberal democrat donors.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)