Our politicians are absolutely pathetic. The minuscule amount of work they do manage to get done is almost laughably dystopian, self interested, and out of touch. No accountability, ever.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
How is it possible that they can even propose this act that clearly violates the first amendment?
This isn't really a question of free speech. Every single one of tiktok's users in the US are still free to say whatever they want. The government is banning a business from the country, which I'm sure we've done before.
Everyone is free to exercise all of their first amendment rights, just somewhere else.
Except for tiktok itself I guess, but businesses (particularly foreign ones) don't really get first amendment rights. Their "speech" is heavily regulated for a lot of reasons, mostly very good ones.
The first amendment isn't a magical catch-all for anything we don't like about the government. It protects citizens from retaliation or punishment by the government. For instance, you can't be punished for calling your senator a dickhead, or arrested for drawing a mean cartoon of the president. Even if you want to call banning tiktok censorship, that still doesn't qualify as a 1A issue as tiktok isn't a person or a citizen of the US.
The law allows banning of ICT products or services. It doesn't matter if it is a profit making business or not. The executive branch makes the determination of which ICT to ban. If the only ones left are the ones the government controls, we lose free speech.
The RESTRICT Act has been garnering bipartisan momentum in the Senate, as well as backing from the Biden administration, as a workable solution to address the emergent risk posed by foreign [Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)] products and services to national security.
If passed, the RESTRICT Act would provide the secretary of commerce broad authority to take appropriate measures to deal with identified risks, and to enforce such measures with hefty civil and criminal penalties.
Any individuals and businesses that are doing business with providers of ICT products or services owned or controlled by foreign companies should track the progress of this proposed legislation through Congress. [https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686]
