While President-elect Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to block an impending US ban on TikTok in a major case argued Friday that pits free speech rights against national security concerns over the app Chinese-owned short videos, many of his Republican allies have urged otherwise.
Those differing views heighten the stakes for the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, as it prepares to decide the fate of a popular social media platform used by about half of Americans in a case that tests First Amendment protections. of the US Constitution against the government. abbreviation of speech.
“This is the most significant free speech case in at least a generation,” said Timothy Edgar, a former US national security and intelligence official who has served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations.
“If we consider that there are 170 million monthly active users of TikTok in the United States, the volume of free speech at stake is the greatest of any Supreme Court case in American history,” added Edgar, who now teaches at in cybersecurity at Brown University and joined a short TikTok support in this case.
Spurred by concerns that China could access data or spy on Americans with the app, Congress overwhelmingly approved the measure last year with bipartisan support, and Democratic President Joe Biden signed it into law. It demands that TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, sell the platform or face a US ban on January 19.
The dispute goes before America’s top court at a time of rising trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies and just 10 days before Trump begins his second term as president.
The Justice Department, defending the law, has said TikTok poses a threat to US national security because of its access to vast amounts of data about US users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate the content they see in the app. .
TikTok and ByteDance reject the national security claims, instead portraying the law as inconsistent with the First Amendment. If the law is allowed to stand “then Congress will have the discretion to prohibit any American from speaking simply by identifying a risk that the speech will be influenced by a foreign entity,” they told the Supreme Court in a filing.
Trump has said he has a “warm spot” for TikTok and has vowed to “save” a platform on which his campaign generated “billions of views”.
“President Trump opposes the ban on TikTok in the United States at this time and seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office,” Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, wrote in a filing, asking the justices to rule on the law. waiting. .
Sauer is Trump’s pick to serve as U.S. solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer at the Supreme Court.
STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL WEIGH IN
In contrast, many Republican lawmakers and officials are pressuring the court — whose conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump during his first term as president — to support the Biden administration in defending the measure.
Republican attorneys general from 22 states filed a brief in court disagreeing with TikTok’s arguments and urging the justices to uphold the statute.
“Allowing TikTok to operate in the United States without severing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposes Americans to the risk of the Chinese Communist Party accessing and exploiting their data,” wrote these state officials, led by the Attorney General. of Montana, Austin Knudsen. presentation.
Montana tried to ban TikTok at the state level, but was blocked by a federal court.
Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has compared TikTok’s court case to a hardened criminal seeking an “execution stay.” The Republican chairman and top Democrat on a US House panel focused on China issues urged the justices to support the measure to “protect the American people from foreign threats.”
The Biden administration on Jan. 3 asked the justices to reject Trump’s request to suspend the ban.
Trump’s support for TikTok is a shift from 2020, when during his first term as president he tried to block the app and force its sale to US companies. Trump has since said a ban on TikTok would benefit Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram, which he has criticized for suspending him following the attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
TikTok, ByteDance and some users who post content on the app appealed a Dec. 6 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the law.
If the Supreme Court upholds the statute, Edgar said, “the stakes for Internet freedom both in the United States and around the world are high.”
The US government, Edgar added, “will be on firm ground if it chooses to regulate or ban any digital platform with significant involvement by foreign investors.” Another widely used platform, Telegram, “could be the future,” Edgar added.
In a December 13 letter, US lawmakers told Apple and Alphabet’s Google, which operate the two main mobile app stores, that they should be ready to remove TikTok from those stores on January 19.
While US users will probably still be able to use TikTok after the deadline because it has already been downloaded to their phones, experts say over time the app will become unusable without software and security updates.
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