I’m no Tiktok fan but the US has extremely broad free speech protections and its hard to see how this could be constitutional.

Individuals posting videos of themselves is clearly speech so we are in the 1st amendment territory. None of the usual exceptions for certain types of content (defamation, threats, fraud etc) apply because the restriction isn’t on specific content.

The only way out I could see is saying national security/secrets require us to prevent the Chinese company Tiktok from operating in the US.

But their free speech isn’t limited. They lose a platform, which is something completely different. Free speech doesn’t mean having to facilitate it.

People can still create a website and post their clips, or move to instagram or Snapchat or bluesky or twitter or whatever.

Thats true from the point of view of the individual poster claiming free speech infringement. I guess I was thiking of it from the point of the corporation which could claim something like a right to use an algorithm to promote certain videos as speech. I’m not sure if this has been decided by higher courts yet.

> Individuals posting videos of themselves is clearly speech so we are in the 1st amendment territory.

Who’s preventing them from posting videos on platforms not controlled by CCP?

"the Act, as construed and applied, is unconstitutional, since it imposes on the addressee an affirmative obligation which amounts to an unconstitutional limitation of his rights under the First Amendment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General

That seems like a very different case since it imposed different rules depending on the content of the speech. The analogous situation to the tiktok ban would be shutting down the postal service, which would be surprising but presumably constitutional.