Courts are increasingly asked to “apply long-standing First Amendment principles to somewhat novel facts” involving digital social media.
They have performed this task often—if not well—in recent cases such as NetChoice v. Paxton, Murthy v. Missouri, and Anderson v. TikTok. The mixed lessons from these efforts were on display in the latest installment in this juridical drama issued Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the TikTok divestiture case, TikTok v. Garland.
TikTok came before the court asserting several challenges to a law that required its separation from parent company ByteDance, an entity headquartered in and subject to the laws of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
That law was, as Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan put it, the product of a “strong bipartisan majority of both houses of Congress, together with two successive…
