Comment by ruilov

Comment by ruilov 11 hours ago

4 replies

they talk more about the motivations of the law in part D.

The "exclusion" referred to in this quote is not the exclusion of tiktok. The court is responding to one of the arguments that tiktok made. Certain types of websites are excluded from the law, and (tiktok says) if you have to look at what kind of website it is, then obviously you're discriminating based on content.

the court is saying that this would be an argument that this law is unconstitutional, period. That's a very hard thing to prove because you need to show that the law is bad in all contexts, and to whoever it applies to, very hard. So tiktok is not trying to prove that, that's not how they challenged the law - instead tiktok is trying to prove something much more limited, ie that the law is bad when applied to tiktok. It's an "as-applied" challenge. In which case, the argument about looking at other websites is irrelevant, we already know we're looking at tiktok. As the opinion says "the exclusion is not within the scope of [Tiktok's] as-applied challenge"

DangitBobby 11 hours ago

I'll copy what I said in another comment:

> At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban? "5 why's" it, so to speak. Did they ever say, "because X, Y, and Z, it is clear the intent of the law is not to prevent speech of certain parties"?

  • ruilov 11 hours ago

    part D. "The record before us adequately supports the conclusion that Congress would have passed the challenged provisions based on the data collection justification alone"

    • DangitBobby 10 hours ago

      This is belied by the lack of laws (and lack of provisions in this law) preventing American companies from collecting data and selling to the highest bidder, including China.

      • ruilov 9 hours ago

        from the opinion: "[Tiktok] further argue that the Act is underinclusive as to the Government’s data protection concern, raising doubts as to whether the Government is actually pursuing that interest"

        ie what you're saying...the Court replies:

        "the Government need not address all aspects of a problem in one fell swoop...Furthermore, as we have already concluded, the Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment"

        Congress can solve one problem without needing to solve all problems.