Professor Jyh-An Lee and CUHK LAW PhD candidate Anqi Wang have published an article entitled “The Exception that Persists: TikTok, PAFACA, and National Security” in the N.Y.U. Journal of Legislation & Public Policy.

About the article: This Article examines the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA)—the first U.S. statute to ban a major social media platform on national security grounds. It argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in TikTok v. Garland sits at the intersection of two exceptionalist traditions: foreign affairs exceptionalism, which counsels judicial deference to the political branches, and internet exceptionalism, the presumption that expressive platforms should remain insulated from state control. When these traditions collided, free speech yielded to national security. The Article cautions that extending Garland’s logic beyond its context risks normalizing broad governmental assertions of national security to justify platform restrictions, and that TikTok is unlikely to be an endpoint in debates over predictive national security reasoning overriding First Amendment interests.

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Read the article here.