Even as the Supreme Court upheld Congress' mandate that TikTok's Chinese owner sell the platform or shut it down, the First Amendment still guarantees the right to hear and receive information, not just to speak freely. While this principle has been obscured in the public discussion surrounding TikTok, the Supreme Court has long acknowledged it, even with respect to dubious content such as that produced and distributed by hostile foreign powers like China. The extremely narrow holding in TikTok v. Garland does not change it.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, Congress was concerned about the Soviet Union and China spreading information with the intent to "indoctrinate, convert, induce, or in any other way influence" Americans about those countries' foreign policies or even foment domestic discord. Under a 1962 statute, the United States Post Office, then the dominant means of delivering and exchanging information, established 10 sorting facilities which evaluated incoming mail from abroad and detained any material deemed to be "communist political propaganda." An intended American recipient of "propaganda" would be sent a notice that his or her mail was being held at the Post Office and was required explicitly to request delivery, otherwise the mail would be destroyed.
An American publisher, Corliss Lamont, was mailed a copy of the Peking Review news magazine, the content of which one imagines hewed pretty closely to the desires of the Chinese Communist Party. Lamont did not respond to the notice that his mail was being detained and sued the government instead. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965) that intercepting mail and holding it for later release was unconstitutional because it imposed a burden on citizens to affirmatively request in writing that their mail actually be delivered. In so doing, Americans would be forced to reveal to the government their interest in information from China or Russia, whether based on scholarly interest, interest in global affairs, sheer curiosity, or even misguided ideological affinity: "This amounts, in our judgment, to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee's First Amendment rights", the Court wrote.
