Last week, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a federal law that threatens to shut down TikTok in the United States. The court’s most consequential conclusion: The First Amendment permits the government to protect Americans from covert foreign manipulation by restricting their access to foreign-controlled media—even when that means Americans’ speech is restricted, too.

The ruling is bad news for TikTok, its China-based parent, ByteDance, and its approximately 170 million American users. It also seriously weakens the First Amendment, and by extension our democracy, at an exceptionally perilous time.

Governments around the world are using the threat of foreign interference to justify the closure and harassment of media organizations and advocacy groups, and to impose new limitations on citizens’ access to information from abroad. Our next president has made clear he will exploit any legal authority he can to suppress what he deems to be “fake news.”

In this political landscape, the court’s opinion is an invitation to abuse. TikTok has said it will ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the case. It should.

The appellate court’s reasoning deviates from ordinary First Amendment principles in a number of ways. To begin, the judges gave near-categorical deference to the government’s claims about the risks associated with TikTok.

Of course, courts often take the government’s assertions at face value in cases implicating national security. Testament to this are decisions like Korematsu v. United States, in which the court upheld the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, and Trump v. Hawaii, in which the court upheld a law that banned travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

But courts have recognized the crucial importance of scrutinizing government claims more closely when First Amendment rights are at stake, given how vital free speech is to the operation of democracy. When the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s request to bar The New York Times from printing articles related to a classified history of the Vietnam War, it did so even though the administration warned that publishing would derail peace talks and expose intelligence agents.

Notably, in its opinion on Friday, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did not cite the Pentagon Papers case, even though the TikTok case, like that one, involves a request to pre-emptively bar speech in the name of national security.

The judges likewise failed to interrogate the government’s claim that the ban is intended to prevent the Chinese government’s covert manipulation of American users—rather than to suppress views that members of Congress dislike. In the weeks before they voted for the TikTok law, many legislators acknowledged forthrightly that they supported it because they were offended by videos on the platform. (The Knight Institute, where one of us is the director and the other was formerly a visiting research scholar, cataloged many of these statements in an amicus brief.)

We would have expected these admissions to be a constitutional death knell. There is no principle more fundamental to the First Amendment: The government may not restrict speech simply because it dislikes its viewpoint. But the circuit court dismissed the legislators’ statements as “stray comments from the congressional proceedings”—even as the Justice Department defended the law by pointing to the dangers posed by specific categories of content, such as posts about China’s relationship to Taiwan.

All of this leads us to the most disturbing feature of the ruling, which is its audacious denial that the TikTok law constitutes censorship at all. In the court’s telling, banning TikTok actually “vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment” by protecting Americans from possible Chinese-government influence over the editorial decisions that power TikTok’s platform. By banning TikTok, the court said, the government is ensuring a less distorted and coercive public sphere.

Even if the court is right about TikTok’s susceptibility to manipulation, it is wrong about the First Amendment and the values that undergird it. For almost a century the courts have interpreted the First Amendment to strongly disfavor paternalistic speech regulation. Except in narrow circumstances, the First Amendment prevents the government from protecting listeners from speech it views as manipulative, particularly when it comes to politics.

Just recently, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that state legislatures could override U.S. social media platforms’ content-moderation decisions to correct perceived bias against conservatives. “On the spectrum of dangers to free expression,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a unanimous court, “there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.”

The circuit court reasoned that the anti-paternalism principle does not apply here because TikTok is controlled by a Chinese company, and China has nothing comparable to the First Amendment that would preclude it from secretly distorting the content shown to TikTok’s users. No one can reasonably deny the possibility that the Chinese government might at some point try to exploit TikTok in exactly this way, even if it’s also clear that the Chinese government does not actually need TikTok to spread disinformation. (TikTok has denied any Chinese government influence on its platform.)

The effect of the ruling, however, is to substitute definite manipulation by our own government for feared manipulation by China. This is not a result that the First Amendment permits.

And if we go down this road, why would we stop with TikTok? China has the ability to manipulate what happens on other platforms, including through informal means. (As others have noted, Elon Musk, who owns X, has many business interests in China.) And why stop with China? After, all, it is not the only foreign power that is not bound by anything comparable to the First Amendment.

Allowing Congress to engage in censorship that would otherwise be prohibited by the First Amendment whenever it can convince a receptive court that doing so will counter foreign manipulation of American audiences would spell a new and dangerous era of speech regulation.

None of this suggests the government should be barred from taking action to prevent powerful companies from exploiting their control over important speech platforms in ways that compromise the integrity of public debate. The whole point of the First Amendment is to guarantee a vibrant, open and genuinely democratic public sphere.

But for good reasons, this is a goal that courts have traditionally permitted legislatures to pursue only through content-neutral, industrywide regulations. When a law targets only one media company, or a cherry-picked handful, there is a high risk it is motivated by displeasure with a specific editorial perspective, rather than by the health of the public sphere writ large. This is that case.

The Supreme Court should intervene to reject the circuit court’s reasoning, invalidate the TikTok law and encourage Congress to address the very real pathologies of the digital public sphere through broad-based regulation, rather than by targeting particular companies and viewpoints. The First Amendment should not be used as a justification to cut off Americans from TikTok, or from the rest of the world.