[nickelpro]

There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.

Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.

Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.

[DangitBobby]

The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.

[nickelpro]

Speech and immigration are completely different areas of the law, there's no useful legal point of comparison in this context.

The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.

So for example, the law technically doesn't ban TikTok at all, but rather mandates divestiture. However, the timeline wasn't realistic to manage such a divestiture, so the court recognized that the law is effectively a ban. The effect is what matters.

Similarly, the law provides a mechanism for the President to designate any application meeting a set of criteria a "foreign adversary controlled application". The court recognizes that the government has a compelling interest in restricting foreign adversaries from unregulated access to the data of US citizens, and the law services that interest.

The law represents a restriction on freedom of expression, TikTok is banned, but the law also represents a compelling government interest. To determine the winner of these two motivations, the court has established various thresholds a law must overcome. The relevant threshold in this case was determined to be Intermediate Scrutiny, and a compelling government interest is sufficient to overcome intermediate scrutiny.

[DangitBobby]

> The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.

Let's agree to disagree.