kava
@kava@lemmy.world
- Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report 2 days ago:
First, this conversation has little to do with fair use. Fair use is when there is an acceptable reason to break copyright. For example when you are making a parody or critique or for education purposes.
What we are talking about is the act of reading and/or learning and then using that information in order to synthesize new material. This is essentially the entire point of education. When someone goes to art school, they study many different artists and their techniques. They learn from these techniques as they merge them together in different ways to create novel art.
Everybody recognizes this is perfectly OK and to assume otherwise is absurd. So what we are talking about is not fair use, but extracting data from copyrighted material and using it to create novel material.
The distinction here is you claim when this process is automated, it should become illegal. Why?
My opinion is if it’s legal for a human to do, it should be legal for a human to automate.
- Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report 3 days ago:
What’s the limit? This needs to be absolutely explicit and easy to understand because this is what LLMs are doing. They take hundreds of thousands of similar algorithms and they create an amalgamation of it.
When is it copying and when it is “inspiration”? What’s the line between learning and copying?
- Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report 3 days ago:
I have no problem copying code either. The question is at what point does it go from
- I’m reading code and doing research
To
- I’m copying code
How abstracted does it have to be before it’s OK? If you write a merge sort, it might be similar to the one you learned when you were studying data structures.
Should you make sure you attribute your data structure textbook every time you write a merge sort?
Are you understanding the point I’m trying to get at?
- Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report 3 days ago:
Well let’s say there’s an algorithm to find length of longest palindrome with a set of letters. I look at 20 different implementations. Some people use hashmaps, some don’t. Some do it recursively, some don’t. Etc
I consider all of them and create my own. I decide to implement myself both recursive and hash map but also add certain novel elements.
Am I copying code? Am I breaking copyright?
As for forbidding patents on software, I agree entirely. Would be a net positive for the world. You should be able to inspect all software that runs on your computer. Of course that’s a bit idealistic and pipe-dreamy.
- Comment on China is attempting to mirror the entire GitHub over to their own servers, users report 3 days ago:
If I look at a few implementations of an algorithm and then implement my own using those as inspiration, am I breaking copyright law and circumventing licenses?
- Comment on Microsoft really wants Local accounts gone after it erases its guide on how to create them 3 days ago:
It depends how you define effective. Of course the consumer would prefer a free market with competition and low barriers to entry. This is the most egalitarian system, where money (and therefore power) gets distributed almost democratically.
It’s a liberal democratic version of capitalism. It’s the version of capitalism that works. Not perfectly, but it rises people out of poverty and is more or less egalitarian, relative to the alternatives.
Authoritarian capitalism is where you still have the large private sector except you don’t have the political freedoms. Think China post 1970s, modern Russia, Singapore.
The government essentially rewards companies that support the power structure. They get privileges and a say at the table. It creates a sort of incestuous relationship between the government and large corporate entities.
The US is moving towards this system as wealth inequality and corporate influence rises (more strongly under Biden than Trump, might I add. Probably to do with pandemic). More $$$ = more power. More power, more influence within the government. Creates a cycle where it’s a “buy your policy” type of democracy.
Slowly our political freedoms are being eroded. Mass surveillance, the CIA and Pentagon are now allowed to spread propaganda on US soil (they were not allowed to before early 2000s), erosion of democratic institutions through populism. For example “fake elections” and events like Jan 6th. We are starting to censor and ban outside views (“misinformation” bans from Covid, the banning of TikTok, Google & Facebook & reddit & Twitter regularly manipulate the information people receive and cooperate with the government)
Only some crazy number like 20% of people approve of Congress in this country. The democracy is falling apart and some new system is forming.
As China is opening up their private market to become more like us in terms of finance, big capital, corporate rights, etc. We are closing down our political system to become more like them in terms of the loss of political freedoms, censorship, etc.
- Comment on Microsoft really wants Local accounts gone after it erases its guide on how to create them 5 days ago:
You know how China has a strong centralized government and cooperates with their big companies? Government says jump, Huawei says how high?
We have a similar system. A strong centralized government that cooperates with the big companies. The primarily difference is that on the spectrum of
Government power <-----------> corporate power
The US leans more to the right.
Really what’s interesting is both the US and China are slowly converging onto a point in the middle. Zizek said something like this some years back… authoritarian capitalism is unfortunately the most effective form of capitalism.
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 1 month ago:
Nice writeup but there’s one key piece of information here that’s wrong in the context of reddit.
The “bot overlord” can easily tell if an account is shadowbanned. I use my trusty puppeteer or selenium script to spam my comments. After every comment, I load up the page under a control account (or even just a fresh page with no cookies/cache, maybe even through VPN if I’m feeling fancy) and check if my comment is there.
Comment is not there after a certain threshold of checks? Guess I’m shadowbanned, take the account off the list and add another one of the hundreds I have to the active list
The fact is that no matter what you do, there will be bots and spammers. No matter what you do, there will be cheaters in online games and people trying to exploit.
It’s a constant battle and it’s an impossible one. But you have to try and come up with solutions but you always have to balance the costs of those solutions with the benefits.
Shadowbanning on reddit doesn’t solve the problem it aims to fix. It does however have the potential for harm to individuals, especially naive ones who don’t fully understand how websites work.
I don’t think the ends justify the means. Just like stop and frisk may stop a certain type of crime or may not, but it definitely does damage to specific communities
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 1 month ago:
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.
If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.
I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.
The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 1 month ago:
I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.
I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.
There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.
There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.
I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.
- Comment on What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say? 1 month ago:
It’s all just fancy statistics. It turns words into numbers. Then it finds patterns in those numbers. When you enter a prompt, it finds numbers that are similar and spits out an answer.
You can get into vectors and back propagation and blah blah blah but essentially it’s a math formula. We call it AI but it’s not fundamentally different than solving 2x + 4 = 10 for x.
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 month ago:
Couple of things
There was a 62% voter turnout in the 2020 election. 46.8% of voters voted for Trump.
0.62 x 0.468 = .290
So actually, 29% of people voted for Trump.
If we do the same calculation for AfD in 2021. 76.6% voter turnout in Germany and AfD got 10.4% of votes.
0.766 x 0.104 = 0.799
So the difference looks like 29% to 8% US to Germany.
But you have to remember the US and Germany are different political systems. There are only two parties in the US, so each of the big parties (DNC, GOP) have many different factions. Moderate Republicans would be an entirely different party from Trumpian “MAGA” Republicans if the US had a party system like Germany.
They functionally ally together in order to form a government, much like different parties will do in parliamentary systems in Europe.
So if we for example take the center-right Christian conservative party and add that to AfD, which in my opinion more closely resembles the GOP, we get the following numbers.
76.6% voter turnout. AfD got 10.4% of votes. CDU got 24.1% of votes.
0.766 x (0.104 + 0.241) = .264
So we’re actually looking at a ratio more like 29% US to 26% Germany. Fundamentally not that different.
And last thing I’d like to add. Shifts in the political Overton window like we’re seeing right now happens at an exponential rate. It’s why Germany in the early 1900s went from a liberal democratic society to full blown Fascist dictatorship fairly quickly.
I think the process has started in the US first, but the movement is shifting to other countries too. US news is emphasized because of the importance of the US as a superpower, but this process of the hard shift to the right is happening in many countries.
We see it not only in certain parties gaining ground like Fratelli d’Italia, Sweden Democrats, Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, etc - but the rhetoric changing. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that would be rare a decade or two ago is seeing a large increase.
I view the US as the leader of the Zietgiest right now, much like Germany was the leader of the Zietgiest during WW2. It’s leading the pack, but we’re all headed towards the same destination.
- Comment on I'm so tired of hearing about US police brutality and China being authoritarian. Why does it feel like everyone is a hypocrite here? Where are the posts about Chinese protests and police brutality? 1 month ago:
It’s because our media is manipulated. When Saudi Arabia commits war crimes, it’s more or less ignored. When Russia does it, it’s plastered all over the media. China suppresses protests, it’s an authoritarian hellhole. When we do it, it’s law and order. In China the great firewall is censorship, here when we ban TikTok it’s justified.
I suggest everyone read Chomsky’s manufacturing consent. It goes over many historical examples like above
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 month ago:
There are right wing populists in virtually every democracy these days. It’s not an issue unique to the US. I think it’s a byproduct of our times. Economic uncertainty + geopolitical tensions and war = hard shift to the right.
- Comment on TikTok sues the US government over ban 1 month ago:
Hey I was born in a country with a military dictatorship and my parents grew up under it.
That’s exactly why I believe in freedom and liberty. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association. We need to uphold these principles so that the US doesn’t slowly slip into authoritarianism like most democracies tend to do over the long term.
That’s exactly why I oppose this TikTok ban with every fiber of my being. If a citizen wants to communicate on a Chinese platform, he has every right to do so under our laws. He can make the executive decision for himself about the potential risks or benefits.
That’s what it means to live in a free society. You are advocating for authoritarianism while you rail against authoritarianism. Reminds me of 1984. War is peace, right?
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
I looked through out of curiosity and I believe you can say with a bit of a stretch that I hit about 3.
I’m never going to go vegan. I was raised in a part of South America with a very strong cattle / meat culture. I don’t want to live without nice steaks every week.
If that means some animal has to live in what’s essentially slavery then it’s the price I’m willing to pay.
Just like we’re both willing to live with poor 3rd worlders mining lithium and cobalt for us in abysmal conditions so that we can communicate on our fancy electronic devices.
The system is a pyramid. Is it our fault we were born near the top? Reminds me of the part in the Bible, the rich man comes up to Jesus and asks him what he should do.
Jesus says “sell all of your belongings, give the money to charity, and follow me”. What’d the rich man do? He cried.
The point is that people wanna be good and ethical but don’t actually want to give up quality of life. It’s not just veganism, it’s for everything. Capitalist/imperialist exploitation, climate change, etc.
Try to lead by example, sell your stuff and follow Jesus.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
Veganism is more or less a 1st world phenomenon. Most humans, especially in the past, did not have the luxury to choose what they could eat. They ate what they could get and if they got access to meat and animal products they ate it because it has high nutritional and caloric value. Even the vegetarian Indians who don’t eat meat foe religious purposes still have eggs, milk, etc.
It feels disconnected with the human struggle.
In addition, it’s sort of meaningless in the grand scheme of things. OK. You don’t eat meat to protect domesticated cows. In reality, those cows would not exist in the first place. So really, you’re advocating to eliminate the species of domesticated cattle.
In addition, our modern society requires massive amounts of energy which is often generated by fossil fuels. Even if a society uses 100% solar, they’re importing products from countries like China that burn coal.
So you’re pumping out carbon emissions that will inevitably result in mass extinctions anyway. It seems like a meaningless protest against the inevitable. You say let’s exterminate the cows to save them from suffering on one hand and with the other drive to work talking on your iPhone with the A/C turned up- contributing to the destruction of infinitely more animals.
The only real way to stop is for everyone to give up every modern luxury and live in a log cabin in the woods. And for the vast majority of the population to die off.
It just feels like pissing into the void but doing so with moral superiority.
Having said all that, I empathize with many vegans. But those are some thoughts on why people may look down on vegans.
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 1 month ago:
In other to infringe the right to speech, you need a valid justification. It needs to be a) narrowly tailored and b) actually accomplish the aim of the legislation.
This is the same reason the judge stopped the Montana TikTok ban.
The fact is, this legislation does not actually result in a scenario where China loses access to data on Americans. They can just buy it - it’s an ocean of data out there and there’s no real way to stop them accessing it.
Unless you were to make large sweeping changes to the way we handle data, like the EU data laws. But that would affect all social media companies.
What I’m saying is it’s not actually for national security. It’s just that if they said the real purpose “ban content potentially manipulated by a specific group of people” then they would require a much higher burden of scrutiny which they could not meet.
There’s a difference legally speaking between “content-neutral” bans and “content-based”. Content neutral for example is national security and requires less scrutiny. You can’t just arbritarily ban content because of what it says. Note the specific text in the ban: because of data collection. Not the content itself.
Make sure to pay attention to the upcoming court case on this situation. It will be an important case. The CCP has signaled they will not approve a sale to an American company, so Bytedance essentially only has one option, and that is to fight this in court.
The fact is the federal government is playing games. They’re playing loosey goosey with the laws in an attempt to manipulate the digital media environment.
This isn’t something a democracy should be doing. It’s akin to banning foreign media. Like Israel banning Al Jazeera. Whole world is going nuts and we’re pretending it’s OK.
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 2 months ago:
I find it amusing how people talk about things they read second hand without understanding.
The nominal reason they are banning TikTok is because of the data collection. Nothing to do with election security, but national security. The real reason is that they want to lock down the digital information space in preparation for WW3. TikTok is harder to control and there’s a lot of anti-government messaging on it.
It’s sort of like the Voter ID laws in GOP states. They pass laws for “election security” by making it so you need an ID to vote. The nominal reason is so that they prevent election fraud. The real reason is they’ve done statistical analysis and that law reduces black votes by a couple percent, and blacks tend to vote Democrat.
The real reason in both cases would be unconstitutional, so they come up with another.
And the mass of idiots online cheer on the deterioration of whatever legitimacy was left in American democratic institutions.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 2 months ago:
PS: I also never claimed I rather have 20000 more people die for accountability…
You said it’s not a question of how much safer it is. You said it’s a question of accountability. So even if it were 50% safer, you claimed it was wrong.
And here’s the thing man, I understand where you’re coming from ij that you shouldn’t reduce a life to numbers. But how does AI driving fundamentally change the current situation?
Car companies already do this. They calculate whether or not fixing a safety problem will cost more or less than the lawsuits from all the dead people. There’s a famous documented case of this. Maybe it’s the Ford / Pinto thing you are referencing.
If you think of AI driving as a safety feature - like seatbelts - would you support it? I don’t know what the actual statistics are, but presumably it’s only going to get better over time.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 2 months ago:
Your thought experiment doesn’t work. I wouldn’t accept any position where my family members die and beyond that, it’s immaterial to the scope of discussion.
Let’s examine various different scenarios under which someone dies in a car accident.
- human driver was negligent and causes a fatal car accident.
Human gets criminal charges. Insurance pays out depending on policy.
- human driver was not negligent and causes a fatal car accident.
Human does not get criminal charged. Insurance pays out depending on policy
- AI driver causes a fatal accident.
Nobody gets criminal charges. Insurance pays out depending on policy.
You claim that you would rather have 20,000 people die every year because of “accountability”.
Tell me, what is the functional difference for a family member of a fatal car accident victim in those 3 above scenarios? The only difference is under 1) there would be someone receiving criminal charges.
They recieve the same amount of insurance money. 2) already happens right now. You don’t mention that in the lack of accountability.
You claim that being able to pin some accidents (remember, some qualify under 2) on an individual is worth 20,000 lives a year.
Anybody who has ever lost someone in a car accident would rather have their family member back instead.
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
Nice deflection. A jingoist with a sense of moral superiority. Yeah, OK.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 2 months ago:
A) you do realize cars have insurance and when someone hits you, that insurance pays out the damages, right? That is how the current system works, AI driver or not.
Accidents happen. Humans make mistakes and kill people and are not held criminally liable. It happens.
If some guy killed your nephew and made him an orphan and the justice system determined he was not negligent - then your nephew would still be an orphan and would get a payout by the insurance company.
Exact same thing that happens in the case of an AI driven car hitting someone
B) if I had a button to save 100k people but it killed my mother, I wouldn’t do it. What is your point?
Using your logic, if your entire family was in the 20,000 who would be saved - you would prefer them dead? You’d rather them dead with “accountability” rather than alive?
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
The national ban has also presumably been crafted by much more experienced lawyers and lawmakers than the Montana ban. Presumably folks that understand the law better than either of us.
Unconstitutional laws are deliberately passed all the time. They happen for political reasons. For example, GOP-led state congress from various states repeatedly tried to pass abortion bans even while Roe V Wade was still active. Why? They are not stupid, they knew it would get stricken down by the courts.
The reason is a) it shows to their base they are trying to do something about abortion. It’s essentially political theater.
b) by continously challenging the law, you can hope for a court case that potentially sets useful precedence for the future. For example Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in 2008. After passing many voter id laws that got repeatedly struck down, eventually it led to a court case that set a better precedence for voter id laws.
If you keep trying, eventually you get a nice ruling and all of a sudden the unconstitutional law you passed is a little less unconstitutional. So next time, you can go a little further and keep pushing the boundaries
So even though we had very strong amendments in the constitution to protect right to vote (15th amendment, 19th amendment, 24th amendment, 26th amendment) by repeatedly challenging those amendments by passing unconstitutional laws, the GOP has effectively managed to bypass the constitution in many states by passing voter id laws that have the simple purpose of getting blacks to vote less
They infringe upon rights the constitution explicitly gives to the citizens by sheer persistence.
IMO comparing a TikTok ban to some major infringement even remotely close to an authoritarian country … it’s just wrong
The reason it’s authoritarian is because the government is playing that game I mentioned above. It’s clear this law has nothing to do with data collection.
They are using that justification because they don’t have any legal leg to stand on if they named the real reason - they want to ban specific content. Instead, they claim they are content neutral and are doing it for national security.
So they are deliberately bending the boundaries of the law in order to reduce personal freedoms and give the government more control over the media that shows up on your screen.
If this isn’t a step towards authoritarianism, I don’t know what is. The DNC is now holding hands with the GOP as they continue to degrade the remainder of legitimacy that American democratic institutions have left while marching towards WW3
And you and many others in this thread are cheering it on, letting your xenophobia be used as a tool to consolidate power by the federal government
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
You are creating a false equivalence here. China is not choosing what is valid or not. They are not preventing you from visiting any other platform. The US government, however, is stepping in and preventing you from visiting a specific platform.
Ideally I agree with you everything would be transparent and open source and we would all be singing hakunah matata.
But if the issue is an opaque system of AI Blackbox algorithms then why target TikTok? All social medias use the same exact principles.
unable to inspect it then I want the person who is able to do so to have interests that are better aligned with mine, either an elected representative or at least a worker with similar national interests to me.
So instead of deciding for yourself, you would rather hand it off to the paternalistic state?
Because newsflash- the executives of TikTok and the CCP officials behind them have less incentive to screw you than the American big tech executives and the federal officials behind them.
a matter of the book store instead of a single book
If we were to use your analogy, it’s not a book store but a farmer’s market. Anyone can set up shop and sell whatever they want.
Your stated issue is that the management of the farmer’s market has the capacity to suppress or amplify certain items depending on their interests.
The problem I see is that what if the American citizen, being fully aware of the bias of this farmer’s market, wants to go on there anyway?
Why should his right be infringed?
Note that the government used very specific language in the ban. There’s a difference between a ban on speech based on the content and one that is content neutral.
For example if I ban a farmer’s market because of a safety issue, that’s a content neutral ban. If I ban because they are selling things I don’t want, that’s a content based ban.
The government is very explicit that this is a content-neutral ban. They claim in the legislation it’s for the explicit purpose of preventing China from collecting data.
Of course, that is nonsense and the real reason is the same one you mention - a content-based justification. Why didn’t they say it?
Because the legal scrutiny for infringing on speech for content-based justification is much higher, and the government would not meet that scrutiny.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 2 months ago:
Because if the answer is “nobody”, they shouldn’t be on the road
Do you understand how absurd this is? Let’s say AI driving results in 50% less deaths. That’s 20,000 people every year that isn’t going to die.
And you reject that for what? Accountability? You said in another comment that you don’t want “shit happens sometimes” on your headstone.
You do realize that’s exactly what’s going on the headstones of those 40,000 people that die annually right now? Car accidents happen. We all know they happen and we accept them as a necessary evil. “Shit happens”
By not changing it, ironically, you’re advocating for exactly what you claim you’re against.
- Comment on Are you prepared for the ramifications of windows 10 EoL? 2 months ago:
The only titles that don’t work in Linux are the ones with invasive anti-cheat.
Virtually all single players game work. I’ve had games that don’t work on Windows due to crashes / performance but run on Linux.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 2 months ago:
Is the investigation exhaustive? If these are all the crashes they could find related to the driver assist / self driving features, then it is probably much safer than a human driver. 1000 crashes out of 5M+ Teslas sold the last 5 years is actually a very small amount
I would want an article to try and find the rate of accidents per 100,00, group it by severity, and then compare and contrast that with human caused accidents.
Because while it’s clear by now Teslas aren’t the perfect self driving machines we were promised, there is no doubt at all that humans are bad drivers.
We lose over 40k people a year to car accidents. And fatal car accidents are rare, so multiple that by like 100 to get the total number of car accidents.
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
I think it’s amusing how you call me wumao, feeling proud of how clever you are, while advocating for the US to emulate China.
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
First off, it doesn’t matter what China is doing. Just because they are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s a justifiable infringement on American citizens. The dynamic between the American citizen and their government is what we consider when determining legality of a law.
Second, removing a platform that people want to communicate on does infringe on speech. You have a right to associate with whoever you want - by the government banning that platform they are telling you who you can and can’t communicate with. Please read previous comment on freedom of association. This is a well established concept with courts ruling this again and again.
The government is arguing that they are justified in this infringement on speech because of national security interests. It is unequivocally an infringement on freedom of speech. It’s just the government is claiming that the pros outweigh the cons.
Sort of like when we infringe on free speech so people can’t yell fire in a movie theater.
Judge Molloy also analyzed the second prong: narrow tailoring. He declared that the state failed to demonstrate that it was not burdening more speech than was necessary to achieve its ends.
… the court found that SB 419 was not narrowly tailored, because Montana had failed to show that the ban would alleviate the harms it sought to address. Molloy determined that, even if SB 419 passed, China would be able to access data on Montanans
There’s an entire legal distinction here between “content-neutral” speech suppression and “content-based”. The federal government’s official stated reason is a “content-neutral” one: China is able to collect data on Americans and this harms national security.
They are not claiming China can influence Americans. Why do you think? Because that would be a “content-based” infringement and therefore subject to a higher level of scrutiny - one that the government likely cannot pass.
Therefore, just like the Montana bill to ban TikTok, the government will have to show that banning TikTok will fix the harm that it’s claiming to address. The law was struck down in Montana because of that reason - banning TikTok does not actually prevent China from collecting data. Anybody can buy data on Americans from many different sources. It’s not a hard thing to do and China could likely do it for a cheaper price than running TikTok.
I believe that the real reason that they are banning TikTok is a “content-based” justification. They don’t want China to influence Americans. They want to have influence and control over the content on TikTok.
This is unconstitutional and deceptive. I hope the USC truly does have political independence and strikes this down. Otherwise this is just another notch on the spiral to authoritarianism. We are becoming China.