Let’s pick up where we left off four weeks ago.

In TikTok, Inc. v. Garland, the U.S. Supreme Court showed that when it really wants to move really fast, it really can.

The plaintiffs-petitioners–whom we’ll call “TikTok”–contended that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, as applied to TikTok, violates the First Amendment.

The court on Dec. 16 received a motion from TikTok and on Dec. 18:

�–� Converted the motion into a request to take up the whole action,

�–� Granted the request,

�–� Directed the parties, which at the ordinary pace would have had months to prepare their opening briefs, to file them by Dec. 27,

�–� Set a Dec. 27 deadline for all amicus briefs,

�–� Directed the parties to file reply briefs by Jan. 3, and

�–� Announced it would hear the challenge on Jan. 10.

You, faithful reader of this column, will recall the musing here that the court–having stepped on the gas and floored it–wouldn’t take its customary several months to write an opinion.

Why? Because the challenged law was to take effect for TikTok on Jan. 19, which was a Sunday in the midst of a three-day weekend. As one could have foreseen as Congress was considering the challenged law, Jan. 20 was an Inauguration Day on which big changes would occur quickly as Joe Biden departed the White House and Donald Trump became America’s 47th president.

Don’t be surprised, you read here, if the court issued its opinion by Friday, Jan. 17.

Lo and behold, the court issued its opinion on Friday, Jan. 17.

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Given which country is behind TikTok, Americans can be forgiven if they didn’t enthusiastically root–or didn’t root at all–for TikTok in this challenge.

So what did the court do?

This is one of those court decisions that–though not hard for the laity to read–isn’t exactly easy for the laity to read either.

But it’s possible for the laity to wade through it and decipher the holding, which citizens need to be able to do even if they’ve never set foot in a law school. So here it is, in short.

“In August 2020, … President Trump determined that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the platform ‘automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users’ and is susceptible to being used to further the interests of the Chinese (g)overnment.

“Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The (a)ct makes it unlawful for any entity to provide certain services to ‘distribute, maintain, or update’ a ‘foreign adversary controlled application’ in the United States.”

From there, the court punted the issue of whether the First Amendment applies: “We assume without deciding that the challenged provisions … are subject to First Amendment scrutiny.”

Having assumed that, this next step was important to the holding: “As applied to petitioners, the challenged provisions are facially content neutral and are justified by a content-neutral rationale.

“They impose TikTok-specific prohibitions due to a foreign adversary’s control over the platform and make divestiture a prerequisite for the platform’s continued operation in the United States. They do not target particular speech based upon its content. Nor do they impose a ‘restriction, penalty, or burden’ by reason of content on TikTok.

“(W)e emphasize the inherent narrowness of our holding. Data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age. But TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the (g)overnment’s national security concerns.

“The challenged provisions further an important (g)overnment interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression and do not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further that interest.

“The platform collects extensive personal information from and about its users.

“Access to such detailed information about U.S. users, the (g)overnment worries, may enable ‘China to track the locations of (f)ederal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.’ And Chinese law enables China to require companies to surrender data to the government, ‘making companies headquartered there an espionage tool’ of China.”

Furthermore, “the (a)ct is sufficiently tailored to address the (g)overnment’s interest in preventing a foreign adversary from collecting vast swaths of sensitive data about the 170 million U.S. persons who use TikTok.

“The provisions clearly serve the (g)overnment’s data collection interest ‘in a direct and effective way.'”

With that, TikTok lost.

Here’s today’s point: You, too, can decipher this, even if you’ve never set foot in a law school.

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As noted four weeks ago, Dr. Randy Elf is still wondering–in all good humor–if he could ever get the U.S. Supreme Court to move this quickly.

COPYRIGHT © 2025 BY RANDY ELF