[paxys]

Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade. If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not. The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.

[mempko]

Except your analogy is flawed. Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US. It's not like the Tiktok's themselves are all Chinese made.

[paxys]

> Tiktok is selling "books" written and published in the US

The entire argument is about their algorithm. They are not written and published in the USA if someone in China controls what goes in them.

[Hizonner]

> Is it? Congress has the authority to regulate international trade.

Not as a pretext for speech regulation. And the right to free speech in the US is understood to include the right to listen.

> If TikTok was shipping books into the USA no one would be arguing whether it would be constitutional to ban them or not.

I'd like to think nobody would be arguing, because that would be clearly unconstitutional. But in fact people probably would try to claim it was somehow acceptable. They'd be wrong.

They might get away with a ban on all books from a given country, if they could show it was really, truly intended to affect only the physical process of printing and the market for that service. The instant it's even peripherally intended to affect the content, it's unconstitutional. And the TikTok thing is about content and who controls content.

You could buy obvious Russian propaganda in the US in the middle of the Cold War.

> The constitution hasn't been updated for the internet and smartphones but they absolutely can be governed the same way, as courts have ruled over and over again.

Great. Since banning book imports would be blatantly unconstitutional, so is this bullshit.