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Ban TikTok: Democracies Can Ban Any Foreign Entity

Taminad Crittenden
Non-violence
Published in
5 min readJan 4, 2025

Democratize Regulation of Foreign Speech

Freedom of speech does not extend to foreign entities.

For this simple reason, it is entirely legitimate for the United States to ban TikTok.

In light of the “People’s” Republic of China’s (PRC’s) propaganda campaigns on TikTok, the USA should ban TikTok so as to prevent that anti-humanitarian regime from spreading deceitful rhetoric into our free society.

There are two U.S. free speech principles that may complicate the ban. This article discusses these principles, but it should be noted that overall the U.S. federal district and appellate courts that have ruled on the issue have not viewed these principles to govern TikTok’s situation and they have ruled strongly in favor of the U.S. government’s authority to ban TikTok. The U.S. Supreme Court will resolve this issue soon.

This entire topic, however, brings up an interesting issue: To promote free societies, how should propaganda from unfree societies be dealt with? Should unfree regimes have freedom in free societies to spend money on messaging?

Right to Access Foreign Propaganda

The first principle is that U.S. citizens seem to have a right to access foreign propaganda if they want to. Arguably, this principle does not concern the TikTok situation because TikTok is a platform. Banning a platform is far less concerning as a potential impingement on free speech rights than banning…

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Non-violence
Non-violence

Published in Non-violence

Too many supposed peacemakers hide their reliance on the violence of police enforcement even from themselves. Violence is physical, not verbal. Humanity has a duty to envision new ways to prevent violence (government or not) & solve other problems voluntarily without coercion.

Taminad Crittenden
Taminad Crittenden

Written by Taminad Crittenden

Analyst. Tip me on https://ko-fi.com/taminadcrittenden or send me some Ethereum digital currency at at this address: 0x5ffe3e60a7f85a70147e800c37116b3ad97afd5e

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