is computer code speech?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

If your strategy is to paint me into a corner by using the printed gun example, it's not going to work. I will agree that like in your abortion example, restrictions on printing weapons can be seen as an attack on gun ownership (or whatever -- I don't really care about this case). That really has nothing to do with whether or not code is speech, though. Yes, you can make some weird argument that printing guns is some sort of political statement, but it's not true that every part of making a political statement is speech.

Computer code is agnostic to inputs/outputs/usage much more than a book is. The implementation and end usage of books and computer code are totally different. Nobody ever reads computer code. Computer code is often nested in software architecture that nobody besides software developers ever looks at. Even if the outputs of code may be widely consumed, the code itself is never something that's meant to be distributed to a wider audience (even in the case where computer software is mass distributed, it's very rare for people to go behind the scenes and look at the code). Nobody writes a book that isn't meant to be read, or is embedded within a system of other books to produce some complex output, and it's rare for books meant as "speech" to not be distributable to a wider audience. That's what makes books and code fundamentally different.

[Mr. Reactionary]

A lot of weird neutral data is free speech though according to Federal courts. Phone book lists, lists of drug prices, TV ratings, photographs, video games (which involves coding). One of the implications of free speech is the right to share information. Computer code is information.