On Jan. 19, barring a last-minute sale, or an 11th-hour intervention by the Supreme Court or Congress, TikTok is scheduled to disappear from U.S. app stores, and possibly from our lives. While arguably this threatens the nation’s critical supply of home makeover content, at least it gave us a mind-bending tour through tech policy and First Amendment law, courtesy of last week’s oral arguments in TikTok v. Garland.

Last April, Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Potentially, the law stands between Americans and any app that a dastardly foreign adversary might inflict on us. In practice, it was mostly aimed at one: TikTok, the viral video app that has 170 million U.S. users.

While TikTok is run by a U.S. company, that company is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese firm. And while ByteDance is technically not an arm of the Chinese government, in China, that appears to be a distinction without a difference, a fact that understandably alarms our legislators.

The company and a group of TikTok influencers have sued to stop the government from forcing divestiture, arguing that this violates their First Amendment rights. The government argues that foreign adversaries don’t have First Amendment rights, and as for the Americans using TikTok to speak their minds, “the Act leaves all of that speech unrestricted once TikTok is freed from foreign adversary control.”

The oral arguments before the Supreme Court posed some thorny questions. Is an algorithm speech? If so, does that speech belong to the foreign company that controls the algorithm or the U.S. company that uses it? Does the right of American influencers to speak their minds include the ability to use an algorithm optimally tuned to spread their particular message? Is preventing a strategic rival from manipulating the algorithms a legitimate national security precaution — or an impermissible restriction on China-friendly points of view?

It also touched on technical and practical questions, of course: Can the company segregate user data securely enough that China can’t access it? Can TikTok or another firm develop an equally compelling algorithm without help from ByteDance?

Reading through the transcript of the arguments, I kept reaching for clarifying analogies and failing to find them. For example: Is this like letting China own our television stations? That seems inapt, because broadcast networks use scarce spectrum that the government has to allocate and can reasonably decide to restrict that allocation.

Ultimately, I concluded there is no good analogy because the technology is too new. Just as society evolved new norms and legal structures to cope with the invention of the printing press and the advent of recorded music, we are struggling with a new situation: algorithms whose operations are somewhat akin to the editorial choices made by traditional publishers, but which have much greater scale and opacity, and which may be developed by teams whose members span the globe.

We don’t have good precedent for any of it.

Like most people who followed the case, I believe the petitioners are likely to lose. Their lawyers strained heroically to fit the algorithms into the existing First Amendment boxes, but unfortunately it wasn’t a very good fit. The Supreme Court seemed disinclined to decide that users had a novel civil right to access a foreign-controlled algorithm.

But just because the forced divestment is probably legal doesn’t mean it’s necessary or wise. I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data.

In a free country, propaganda has to be subtle, or the audience will rebel. The communist propaganda the Red-hunters worried about was so insidious that most of the audience missed it. Chinese influence over TikTok will be similarly constrained: If the app starts delivering Americans a flood of mindless pro-China dreck, those 170 million users will swipe away or open a more entertaining app.

If ByteDance is allowed to keep ownership of TikTok, the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos — indeed, it probably already has. But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.