Supreme court begins to hear arguments in TikTok case
Arguments have begun at the supreme court. First up is Noel Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, who’s arguing that the US should halt the ban. He’s trying to convince the judges that the law passed by Congress last spring infringes on TikTok’s freedom of speech.
Francisco said this isn’t about TikTok being a national security threat, but instead “the government’s real target, rather, is the speech itself.” He concluded his short opening statement saying, “In short this act should not stand.”
Justices are now questioning him about the merits of his argument that the ban-or-sale bill infringes on both the free speech rights of TikTok and its American users.
Key events
TikTok maintains it is not controlled by the Chinese government. It’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, but TikTok operates separately with headquarters in Singapore and the US. TikTok says its user data in the US is handled by the company Oracle.
Justice Samuel Alito asked TikTok’s lawyer if the company was owned directly by the Chinese government would he make the same arguments.
“I wouldn’t make the same argument,” Noel Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer said, reiterating that TikTok is independent from ByteDance.
When the judges asked Francisco if TikTok can change the app’s recommendation algorithm, he said, “The fact is that TikTok US has authority over the algorithm.” He added that TikTok hasn’t removed or restricted content at the request of China, or any other government.
The judges immediately started in with questions regarding free speech. Justice Clarence Thomas was the first up asking TikTok’s lawyer, “What is TikTok’s speech here?”
Noel Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, compared TikTok to the Washington Post and other newspapers and how those publications have the right to freedom of speech, despite having private and sometimes foreign owners, as with Politico and its German parent Axel Springer. The main thrust of TikTok’s stance in this case is that a ban or forced sale would amount to a violation of free speech for the tens of millions of people who use the app in the US.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor followed that line of questioning and asked Francisco if he thought the US government should be able to have the self-interest to say when there is a threat.
“We have a right to say you can’t do that, you can’t speak,” Sotomayor said.
Supreme court begins to hear arguments in TikTok case
Arguments have begun at the supreme court. First up is Noel Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, who’s arguing that the US should halt the ban. He’s trying to convince the judges that the law passed by Congress last spring infringes on TikTok’s freedom of speech.
Francisco said this isn’t about TikTok being a national security threat, but instead “the government’s real target, rather, is the speech itself.” He concluded his short opening statement saying, “In short this act should not stand.”
Justices are now questioning him about the merits of his argument that the ban-or-sale bill infringes on both the free speech rights of TikTok and its American users.
Could Donald Trump stop the TikTok ban?
Trump has filed a request with the Supreme Court to delay the implementation of a ban on TikTok until he takes office on 20 January, which the court declined to immediately act on. The president-elect’s intervention shows the significant effort by TikTok to forge inroads with Trump and his team during the presidential campaign.
“President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute,” said D John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer who is also the president-elect’s pick for US solicitor general.
“Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act’s deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025, while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump’s incoming administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case,” he added.
As president, it will be up to Trump to interpret how the ban-or-sale bill is enforced. If the law is upheld, he could weaken it by directing the US Justice Department to delay exacting penalties or broker a deal that he declares meets the threshold for divestment. The Cato Institute, a right-wing thinktank in Washington, DC, said in an analysis on the subject: “A new administration could approve ‘qualified divestments’ or also informally extend the timeline by declining to enforce the penalties under the ban if a sale did not occur by January 19 or an extended deadline.”
Less than two weeks after the federal appeals court ruling, TikTok filed an emergency motion asking the supreme court to halt the enforcement of the law. The supreme court agreed to review the request and expedited oral arguments. The court has since received nearly two dozen amicus briefs, or “friend of the court” briefs, from both sides of the debate.
The most notable of those was filed by Donald Trump himself. He asked the court to pause the ban, which is scheduled to go into effect one day before his inauguration, so that his administration could “pursue a negotiated resolution”.
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform,” reads the brief. “Such a resolution would obviate the need for this Court to decide extremely difficult questions.”
Shortly after Joe Biden signed the act into law, TikTok sued the US government in an attempt to block it. The company argued the ban is unconstitutional, unfairly singles out TikTok, and violates the first amendment and the right to free speech.
The law “will force a shutdown of TikTok … silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere”, TikTok wrote in its complaint.
A three-judge panel for the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the government last month. They said the possible threat to US national security outweighed people’s loss of access to the social media site.
The judges also said the first amendment is to protect free speech for people in the US and “the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation”.
What will happen to the TikTok app if it gets banned?
New users will not be able to download TikTok from app stores and existing users will not be able to update the app, because the law prohibits any entity from facilitating the download or maintenance of the TikTok application. In a 13 December letter, US lawmakers told Apple and Alphabet’s Google, which operate the two main mobile app stores, that they must be ready to remove TikTok from their stores on 19 January.
Cloud service provider Oracle could see some disruption to its work with TikTok. Oracle hosts TikTok’s US user data on its servers, reviews the app’s source code and delivers the app to the app stores. Google declined to comment, while Oracle and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
The federal law to ban TikTok overwhelmingly passed the Senate and House last April. It came a year after Montana was the first state to ban TikTok, although a judge blocked that law on free speech grounds.
The law, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, was signed by Joe Biden last spring. It came two years after the president banned TikTok on federal government phones and laptops.
The US government has consistently said TikTok is a national security threat. Lawmakers say that China has the potential to control what people see on the app and spread propaganda. They also fear China could gain access to Americans’ sensitive data and monitor their behavior.
“Your platform is basically an espionage platform for the Chinese Communist party,” said Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, during a Senate judiciary committee hearing last January with TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew.
To date, the US government has not disclosed evidence that Beijing or ByteDance has used TikTok to manipulate Americans.
TikTok has 170 million US users on its platform, about half of the country’s population, and the prospect of banning the app has brought together unlikely allies. On one side are those who herald the ban, saying TikTok has the potential to be manipulated by the Chinese Communist party, which includes a bipartisan coalition of Congress members.
On the other side are countless influencers, civil liberties groups and, more recently, Donald Trump, who first proposed banning TikTok nearly five years ago. Now, Trump and others say prohibiting Americans from accessing the app would violate the free speech of tens of millions of people.
“The government’s attempt to cut US users off from speaking and sharing on TikTok is extraordinary and unprecedented,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.
US supreme court to hear arguments over sale-or-ban TikTok law
The US supreme court will hear oral arguments over the fate of TikTok on Friday. It’s the latest battle in the long war over whether to ban the tremendously popular social media app in the US – and will force the justices to weigh the importance of national security with the freedom of speech.
TikTok and its parent company, Chinese-based ByteDance, asked the supreme court to review the case after a lower court ruled last month to uphold a law to ban the app in the US. That ban is scheduled to go into effect on 19 January, unless ByteDance sells TikTok’s assets to a non-Chinese company. While ByteDance has the option to divest, it claimed in a legal filing that divestiture “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”.
Oral arguments are expected to last two hours, during which each side will be allotted time to make their case. In a filing, the court wrote that both sides should be prepared to argue whether the ban violates the first amendment.
We will bring you all the latest from the hearing, set to start at 10am ET.
