The question
Whether a federal law requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company to divest the app or face a U.S. ban violates the First Amendment.
TikTok Inc. v. Garland
What the Court decided
The Court upheld the federal law requiring TikTok's parent company to sell the app or see it banned in the United States. It held the law does not violate the First Amendment, because it targets the national-security risk of foreign adversary control over Americans' data, not the content of speech, and it survives the applicable level of scrutiny. The decision was unanimous.
How the justices split
UnanimousPer curiam (unsigned)
Delivered by the Court
The divest-or-ban requirement is justified by the government's national-security interest in preventing a foreign adversary from controlling the data of 170 million American users, an interest unrelated to suppressing any message. Applying intermediate scrutiny, the law is content-neutral as applied here and does not burden more speech than necessary to serve that interest, so it does not violate the First Amendment.
How we know · 3 sourced claims
The Court held the TikTok divestiture provisions do not violate the First Amendment.
Source: syllabus, Held, at 24-656
The Court grounded the law in the national-security interest in foreign-adversary control of Americans' data.
Source: opinion (per curiam)
The decision was per curiam and unanimous.
Source: syllabus, per curiam