Surprising to me that the First Amendment doesn’t even make an appearance in most of the news articles and commentary about the TikTok ban. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/technology/trump-wechat-tiktok-china.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

If Trump banned Americans from transacting with a foreign media company, we’d all understand the ban to raise serious First Amendment concerns. Why doesn’t a ban on Americans transacting with a foreign social media company raise similar concerns?

In Lamont v Postmaster General, the Supreme Court held that Americans have a right to receive communist literature from abroad. Aren’t the First Amendment concerns *more* pronounced here because Americans aren’t (only) recipients of the content but also publishers of it?

And doesn’t Kleindienst v. Mandel, in which US residents were recognized to have standing to challenge the government’s denial of visa to a foreign scholar, confirm that TikTok users in the United States would have standing to challenge the TikTok ban?

More broadly, and finally, what kind of precedent do we set by allowing the president to ban Americans from receiving or interacting with foreign media? Today TikTok and tomorrow … ?