When the Supreme Court upheld a law that banned TikTok from the US, it seemed well aware that its ruling could resonate far beyond one app. The justices delivered an unsigned opinion with a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1944: “in considering the application of established legal rules to the ‘totally new problems’ raised by the airplane and radio, we should take care not to ‘embarrass the future.’”

Last Friday, the court tried to accomplish this with a narrow ruling: a decision that upheld the government’s ability to ban one service on a tight timeline, while stressing a limited scope concerning “new technologies with transformative capabilities.” Yet, amid a confounding political circus over TikTok, some legal experts believe the Supreme Court’s ruling could have a broad ripple effect on speech and tech law — they’re just not agreed on what it would be. 

“Even though it’s narrowly written, it also seems clear that they want to make a mark on these kinds of questions,” says Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University’s public policy school. University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier put it more bluntly on Bluesky: “The Court tried but failed to make no new law here.”

Lakier’s main concern, echoed by several amicus briefs in the case, is that the Supreme Court is enabling a form of backdoor speech regulation. In oral arguments, the US government insisted that the ban wasn’t a First Amendment issue because it only targeted corporate structure — in this case, TikTok’s foreign ownership. But TikTok argued that lawmakers disliked TikTok and its users’ speech and merely found a pretext for punishing it. At the very least, Lakier and others worry the Supreme Court ruling could let something like that happen to other communications platforms.

“The very worst part of the opinion (I think right now) is that it gives [governments] space to whitewash bad content-based motivations by tacking on plausible-sounding content-neutral ones,” Lakier wrote. The court determined that selling a business isn’t an expressive act, but she argues this conflicts with one of its most widely known rulings: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which found that an act that doesn’t explicitly involve speech (donating to political campaigns) could still count as a form of speech.

Then there’s the ruling’s decision that national security could justify potential speech suppression. The court “has weakened the First Amendment and markedly expanded the government’s power to restrict speech in the name of national security,” said Jameel Jaffer, Knight First Amendment Institute executive director. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project deputy director Patrick Toomey echoed these concerns: “the Supreme Court is giving the executive branch unprecedented power to silence speech it doesn’t like, increasing the danger that sweeping invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”

Kreps thinks the ruling is unlikely to bring a wave of censorship for US-based companies, though. “I think that part of the opinion was indeed narrow, and was very careful that this foreign ownership puts it into a very different category,” she says. “American-owned platforms are still covered pretty aggressively under Section 230.”

But if nothing else, the decision will “make it more difficult for the United States to challenge the increasing number of censorial speech regulations targeting U.S.-based platforms in other countries,” writes Jacob Mchangama, executive director of The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University.

While some fear a future of speech regulations wrapped in national security rhetoric, others make the opposite argument: that it will stop businesses from dodging regulation by hiding behind the First Amendment.

The Open Markets Institute, which advocates for stronger antitrust enforcement, took a positive view of the ruling — despite being unconvinced of the law’s merits. “The Supreme Court reaffirms an important precedent that Congress maintains fundamental legislative authority to regulate corporations,” senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley says in a statement. “In other words, corporations may not hide behind flimsy First Amendment arguments in order to avoid regulation carte blanche.”

University of Colorado Law School professor Blake Reid says the ruling is unlikely to affect some baseline legal questions, like how the court decides whether future tech laws raise First Amendment concerns. He believes TikTok made a weak argument for its own speech interests, particularly because the law’s penalties apply to app stores and hosting services, not TikTok itself. “TikTok had a harder job than it seemed to think it did in establishing how its speech was getting implicated,” says Reid. “When your speech is contingent on the speech of platforms who are not going to show up and fight the government on your behalf, that’s a tough place to be in.”

Other platforms have made similar arguments convincingly, though — Reid pointed, for instance, to the 2024 NetChoice rulings that recognized content moderation as expressive speech. 

The TikTok ruling could change how courts across the country address one crucial issue: the level of scrutiny applied to lawsuits that allege First Amendment violations, a decision that dramatically impacts their likelihood of success. The government put forward two separate rationales for its ban: concerns that China was collecting US data and that it could manipulate TikTok’s algorithm for propaganda purposes. The court seemed skeptical of the latter argument, and it decided data collection alone justified upholding the law. “The court was pretty open here to saying, we’re going to look past the justification we might have some more concerns about and look for the one that seems legitimate,” Reid says. Lower courts, he predicts, could decide “maybe we can be a little bit more solicitous” of the claims legislators make about why they’re passing internet regulation.

It’s a balancing act the Supreme Court will have to make again later this year. Last week, the court held arguments in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, which pits First Amendment rights against state legislatures’ concerns about children’s access to pornography. That decision will hinge on what level of scrutiny the court applies — and its ruling could overturn a two-decade-old precedent and age-gate parts of the internet.  

Even so, Reid sees the TikTok ruling’s role as “a pretty small change on the margins” in the grand scheme of things. In the end, Reid says, “the biggest thing about this case is just the impact on TikTok itself.”