U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok if It Is Not Sold ⇥ apnews.com

Mark Sherman, Associated Press:

The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company,holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

The opinion (PDF) is predicated solely on data collection concerns. The justices did not even consider questions about TikTok’s recommendations system, finding that national security alone is worth a change in TikTok’s ownership.

This was a per curiam opinion, but both Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch elaborated separately. Sotomayor (I trimmed references in these excerpts but otherwise left them whole):

[…] The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. […] And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.” […] That, too, calls for First Amendment scrutiny.

Gorsuch:

First, the Court rightly refrains from endorsing the government’s asserted interest in preventing “the covert manipulation of content” as a justification for the law before us. […] One man’s “covert content manipulation” is another’s “editorial discretion.” Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all kinds routinely make less-than-transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Without question, the First Amendment has much to say about the right to make those choices. […]

These are two ideologically divergent justices similarly compelled by arguments for TikTok to moderate and recommend as it sees fit. Perhaps the court would have ultimately come down differently on these questions if the justices had spent more time considering them, but all this produced is understandable concern over user data. Requiring TikTok to be sold off or banning it is not very useful for correcting that misbehaviour, but that was not the question before the court.