This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has decided to let stand a divest or ban order for the social media app, TikTok.

But the arguments adopted by the court, despite their best efforts, may open up a broader range of restriction on speech platforms.

Cato's Tommy Barry and David and Sarah comment.

Maybe the funniest part of all of this TikTok imbrilyo, for me at least, has been TikTok refugees as a sign of protest against the U.S. federal government Congress and the president, fleeing TikTok to go to an app that is actually a Chinese app that is named for the little book of quotations from one of

history's greatest monsters.

Tommy, can you walk me through what you have been able to glean from the opinion of the court?

Sure. So the court ruled today nine the opinion of the court. Sure.

So the court ruled today nine to nothing on the judgment upholding the D.C. Circuit's opinion,

which upheld the TikTok ban.

So the law is going to stay in effect.

The courts are not going to be striking it down.

They're not going to be saving TikTok.

The first step in the court's analysis was to say,

strict scrutiny, the highest form of scrutiny does not apply here. That form of scrutiny is triggered

if a law is either based on content, so if it's triggered by a particular type of thing you want

to say, or if it targets a particular speaker because of what that

speaker says. And this is where I think the court's reasoning was most dubious, even though

the law singles out TikTok by name. The court held that the reasons for doing so had nothing to do

with the speech on TikTok, and therefore it's not treated as a speaker-based ban.

So they only applied intermediate scrutiny, and then they held that interests in data

privacy, given the wide reach of TikTok, given that it has 170 million users, it had a unique

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