Alan Rozenshtein in The Atlantic:

But in its decision, the court did something unexpected. In addition to crediting the government’s national-security arguments, it highlighted an important tension within pro-free-expression arguments: the right to access and speak on the platform of one’s choosing versus the right to have platforms free from foreign manipulation and control. The court explained:

In this case, a foreign government threatens to distort free speech on an important medium of communication. Using its hybrid commercial strategy, the [People’s Republic of China] has positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok in order to serve its own ends. The PRC’s ability to do so is at odds with free speech fundamentals. Here the Congress, as the Executive proposed, acted to end the PRC’s ability to control TikTok. Understood in that way, the Act actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment.

This anti-distortion rationale for government speech regulation used to be central to the First Amendment, especially in campaign-finance cases, until the Supreme Court rejected it when striking down corporate campaign-contribution limits in Citizens United v. FEC.Recently, in last term’s Moody v. NetChoice, the Court criticized state laws limiting social-media content moderation by invoking an (in)famous 1970s precedent that the government cannot “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.”

But the anti-distortion rationale lives on in national-security cases. For example, only a year after Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision by then–D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh that foreigners have no First Amendment right to contribute to U.S. elections.

The anti-distortion argument also figured in the concurring opinion by Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which focused on the long history of legislation restricting foreign ownership of key sectors of the U.S. economy, including radio, broadcast TV, and cellular networks. These restrictions were motivated by the same legitimate concerns as the TikTok law: the possibility for covert manipulation of the American information environment. The emphasis here is on covert because, as Srinivasan pointed out, “counterspeech”—responding to objectionable speech with more speech—“is elusive in response to covert (and thus presumably undetected) manipulation of a social media platform.”