TikTok, Inc. v. Garland

Applying this standard to TikTok's challenge, the Court found that the government's interest in preventing a foreign adversary's covert control of a platform with 170 million American users was sufficiently compelling, particularly given classified intelligence documenting ByteDance's ties to the Chinese government and potential for data exploitation. The Act met the tailoring requirement because it did not suppress TikTok's speech or the speech of creators on the platform—it instead targeted the platform's ownership structure and data access vulnerabilities, making it a structural rather than content-based restriction. This distinction proved decisive: the government was regulating who could control the infrastructure and access American user data, not dictating what speech could occur on the platform, thereby avoiding the heightened scrutiny that content-based restrictions trigger under the First Amendment.