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A comment on Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage for shutdown. Parent comment

Re:Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage f... by twoodfin on Friday January 17, 2025 @12:42PM (#42741002)
That's what the question of strict scrutiny vs. intermediate scrutiny vs. rational basis is about. The courts would have to decide the appropriate level of scrutiny given the legal context and then apply that to the law as written.

Your hypothetical clearly implicates the Times' speech, so intermediate scrutiny at least would be applied, requiring that the law serve an important governmental purpose. I think that would be a difficult argument for the government to make, especially if the law was selective about which kinds of media institutions could and could not have any foreign ownership in general. The TikTok law is much more specific.

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Re:Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage f... by btown on Friday January 17, 2025 @01:16PM (#42741480)
For those interested, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47986 is a relatively approachable overview of these guidelines.

It's interesting to read the full TikTok opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf and search for "scrutiny" and "tailored" while referencing some of the diagrams from the overview above. It's a good case study of how different levels of scrutiny are evaluated!

(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

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Re:Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage f... by User23 on Friday January 17, 2025 @04:52PM (#42743652)
IANAL, but my lay opinion is that thanks to the foreign commerce clause this would be a matter of rational basis.

So quite likely Congress could craft such a law and have it hold up, if it could show that foreign control of the NYT (which is incidentally the case) posed a national security concern.

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Re:Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage f... by twoodfin on Friday January 17, 2025 @05:13PM (#42743834)
IANALE, but any time the exercise of fundamental rights is being constrained, I understand intermediate scrutiny is the floor.
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Re:Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage f... by User23 on Friday January 17, 2025 @09:25PM (#42745256)
Yes but foreigners have way lower presumption of rights.
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