> But there are American users making and viewing content on that platform.

Those Americans can host the exact same content on youtube or any of the many other video hosting sites.

This is not a free speech issue, it is a megaphone issue.

> after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in,

I think if that were the situation then yes the first amendment would be in issue. But I don't think anyone is saying that this is happening here. As I understand it this has nothing to do with what anyone is saying on TikTok and there are no social or protest movements gaining ground on TikTok that the government is trying to suppress. The only issue here is the foreign ownership and how that ownership is used. I don't think anyone is saying the government is doing this to silence any TikTok users

An issue arises when popularity is manipulated through artificial boosting by an adversarial government.

At some point, it becomes State Propaganda masquerading as grassroots activists.

Control over content can influence and distort public discourse and understanding. This is also against the spirit of free expression envisioned in the constitution and instead injecting an intentionally divisive voice.

The physical equivalent would be if the Chinese intelligence apparatus opened an auditorium where they said "come sit here and let us read your mind and we will feed you what advances our national interest".

I do not think that the constitution necessarily applies to corporations. Corporations, for example, do not have a vote.

Forced corporate divestiture is a thing, for example Merck.

The constitution applies to the people of the United States. It's in the first line: "We the people of the United States..."

That Constitution also includes numerous clauses granting Congress the authority to regulate international commerce (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3). TikTok is a foreign commercial enterprise. We have restricted foreign products and services since the Boston Tea Party.

That indirectness is exactly why it's not. The first amendment ensures you can express what you want, but you're not owed a platform.

By your very broad definition of infringement if a newspaper refuses to pay it's taxes, and then the government shuts down the newspaper down for that, this would be infringement.

Clearly it's not.

Yes, the government can make laws that effect speech platforms just like we can make them pay taxes.

Welcome to the religious fallacy of strict textualism, currently worshipped by the Supreme Court majority

you're right, my statement is an extreme oversimplification and there are situations where the constitution does apply to noncitizens (like due process during deportation) or places where things are unclear (if speech of foreign nationals were being regulated). But this case where we are talking about a foreign media platform's right to operate in the US without any reference to the content they are broadcasting... this seems to be one of those rare clear cut cases. I mean no one saw any issue with America effectively banning RT.

There were some people on here saying that national security is just a pretense and the government is actually doing this because they dislike some of the content being posted on TikTok. I don't know if that's the case but if it were then I would concede there is a first amendment issue. But absent that I think it's safe to say that this case doesn't raise the first amendment.

Yes, of course Congress has the authority to restrict foreign companies purely from the Commerce Clause alone. Their power over restricting foreign entities in the U.S. is nearly total. The U.S. is under no obligation to host speech or operations from any foreign business, entity, or application for any reason whatsoever.

No, they couldn't ban just one book printed by a French company. They'd have to ban the company entirely. And that's what happened here too. It's not just TikTok that got banned, but all of ByteDance's other apps too, e.g., Marvel Snap and CapCut.

And it's also important that divesting was an option instead. In your analogy, they couldn't ban the books outright, but could demand they be published somewhere else.

No. But they could ban American companies from providing services directly to that French publisher (e.g., a US company couldn't print books for or sell paper to that French publisher). However, a US law could not stop me from legally reading a copy I owned, or from selling or giving that copy to someone else within the US...

The First Amendment case would be much clearer if this was actually about banning access to TikTok (it's not: TikTok self-blocked US users, Amazon/Oracle shut off servers, and app stores stopped distributing to US users). TikTok could choose to operate their service (like many other Chinese companies) using only non-US infra and without relying on American companies to distribute their app; indeed, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, hosted entirely from Chinese servers, continued to work just fine.

This case is also a reminder of why the iOS App Store is so bad for rights: at least on Android, you could sideload a 'banned' app; Google can comply with the law and US users can still download TikTok. On iOS, you don't have that option.