TikTok Inc. v. Garland

Majority reasoning

The Court assumed — without definitively deciding — that the law triggers First Amendment scrutiny, because even if the law does not directly regulate speech, an effective ban on a platform used by 170 million Americans places a significant burden on expressive activity. The Court then held that the law is content neutral — meaning it targets the platform not because of what people say on it, but because of who controls it and what data it collects — and therefore only needs to pass the less demanding intermediate scrutiny standard rather than the stricter standard applied to laws that target specific messages or viewpoints. The Court found the government's interest in preventing China from accessing the personal data of tens of millions of Americans to be an important and well-supported national security concern, noting that Chinese law can compel ByteDance to hand over data and that the government's prediction of potential misuse deserves substantial deference in foreign policy and national security matters. The Court also found the law sufficiently tailored, reasoning that a conditional ban — one that lifts if a qualifying sale occurs — is not broader than necessary, and that the government is not required to adopt the least restrictive alternative as long as its chosen approach is reasonable and grounded in substantial evidence. Finally, even setting aside a separate government argument about preventing covert manipulation of TikTok's recommendation algorithm (which might raise harder First Amendment questions), the Court concluded the data-collection rationale alone was sufficient to sustain the law, given the overwhelming focus on data security in the congressional record and the law's broad bipartisan passage.