Nine Supreme Court justices considered the law banning TikTok,

and all nine of them concluded that that law passes constitutional muster.

Normally, if I see a legal issue one way, and then all nine justices see it the other way, that gives me great pause.

But this is a strange situation.

The Supreme Court's TikTok opinion is simply not that impressive.

It feels, as you read through it, like they simply decided the wrong case.

Which, I will put it to you in this episode, is exactly what happened. The court focused on

corporate ownership and platform size and data collection and foreign adversaries, when what it should

have been focused on was the First Amendment rights of the American social media user.

Americans have the right to read, hear, and view what they want and to make up their

own minds about it. The First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring speech out of a fear that it is too persuasive.

This power to persuade principle was ably presented to the Supreme Court, but the justices turned a deaf ear.

Anyone who reads the court's decision and nothing else will never know that the principal was at the heart of the case.

We're going to get the TikTok decision right on a very special episode of this, the tech

policy podcast. I'm your host, Corbyn Barthold. I'm Joe. on a very special episode of this, the Tech Policy Podcast.

I'm your host, Corbyn Barthold.

I'm joined today by Jeffrey Fisher.

Jeff is a professor of law at Stanford,

and he is a leading Supreme Court practitioner.

He is many other impressive things.

But he comes here today as the attorney who argued the TikTok case before the Supreme Court on behalf of a group of American TikTok users.

Sadly, he did not prevail in Washington, even though he made what should have been the winning argument.

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