There are limits to the First Amendment, under established U.S. Supreme Court precedent. There is no constitutional protection for inciting violence, committing perjury, or child pornography, for example. But when the justices convene on Friday to consider legislation that would effectively ban the video-based social media app TikTok in the United States as of January 19, they will be asked to carve out another exception, at least implicitly: for speech that the government says might threaten national security.

Civil liberties groups warned that the TikTok ban cannot be squared with the First Amendment, and that the lower court that upheld the ban in December improperly deferred to the government’s speculative arguments about the app’s potential national security risks.

“Although the government invokes ‘national security’ to justify its sweeping ban, that does not alter the applicable First Amendment standards,” argued a civil liberties coalition, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a brief supporting TikTok and a group of TikTok creators suing to block the law. “In fact, the judiciary has an especially critical role to play in ensuring that the government meets its burden when the government invokes national security.”

The TikTok ban case pits free speech against the specter of foreign threats. And many fear the Supreme Court will tip the balance against the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s millions of American users and creators.

The TikTok ban took shape during the first Trump administration, and it culminated with passage of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024. The bill was tacked onto a foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel, and it passed overwhelmingly in Congress. (President-elect Donald Trump, who endorsed banning TikTok during his first term, reversed course after joining the platform last summer; in a bizarre brief to the Supreme Court, he asked the justices to pause proceedings until he’s back in the White House on January 20, which........

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