Executive Director Jameel Jaffer spoke this week at the National Constitution Center’s National First Amendment Summit. The panel, moderated by Bruce Brown and also featuring Floyd Abrams and Lyrissa Lidsky, explored the First Amendment in the courts. 

On Texas’s TikTok ban, which the Knight Institute is challenging as it applies to public university faculty, Jaffer explained, “One effect of that ban is to prevent public university professors from accessing TikTok in the classroom or studying TikTok, including studying the problems of disinformation and data collection … that are ostensibly the justification for the ban in the first place.” 

When asked about emerging questions pertaining to the First Amendment in the digital age, Jaffer noted, “There are a lot of differences between social media companies and newspapers, and figuring out which of those differences should matter, whether any of them should matter, is a really difficult task. … How the Court answers those questions is going to make a huge difference to what the digital landscape looks like over the next 20 years.”

Watch the panel below: