In other to infringe the right to speech, you need a valid justification. It needs to be a) narrowly tailored and b) actually accomplish the aim of the legislation.

This is the same reason the judge stopped the Montana TikTok ban.

For a) 170 million Americans use TikTok. So the law has to be ironclad legally speaking to be considered narrowly tailored. It needs to be the bare minimum the government can possibly do to alleviate the ill it claims to address.

The fact is, this legislation does not actually result in a scenario where China loses access to data on Americans. They can just buy it - it's an ocean of data out there and there's no real way to stop them accessing it.

Unless you were to make large sweeping changes to the way we handle data, like the EU data laws. But that would affect all social media companies.

What I'm saying is it's not actually for national security. It's just that if they said the real purpose "ban content potentially manipulated by a specific group of people" then they would require a much higher burden of scrutiny which they could not meet.

There's a difference legally speaking between "content-neutral" bans and "content-based". Content neutral for example is national security and requires less scrutiny. You can't just arbritarily ban content because of what it says. Note the specific text in the ban: because of data collection. Not the content itself.

Make sure to pay attention to the upcoming court case on this situation. It will be an important case. The CCP has signaled they will not approve a sale to an American company, so Bytedance essentially only has one option, and that is to fight this in court.

The fact is the federal government is playing games. They're playing loosey goosey with the laws in an attempt to manipulate the digital media environment.

This isn't something a democracy should be doing. It's akin to banning foreign media. Like Israel banning Al Jazeera. Whole world is going nuts and we're pretending it's OK.