TikTok could “go dark” next week, company tells SCOTUS

A TikTok lawyer told the Supreme Court on Friday that the app could “disappear” next week and asked skeptical judges to issue an injunction preventing a law banning the platform from taking effect in the United States.

NBC News reported that company lawyer Francisco Noel He told the justices on Friday that TikTok had First Amendment protections, an argument that both conservative and liberal justices seemed skeptical about.

Last April, the president joe biden He agreed with Congress that TikTok posed a potential national security threat. The popular app is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Biden signed a law offering ByteDance until next week to divest from TikTok or remove it from US app stores. The company refused to do so.

C-SPAN shared an argument Francisco presented before the associate judge Brett Kavanaugh while involving the president-elect donald trump could be a lifeline for the app once he takes office on January 20.

Triumph filed his own motion last month that sought to temporarily stop the TikTok ban. During his first term, Trump criticized TikTok as a security risk, but after the 2024 election, he touted his popularity on the app. multimillionaire Jeff Yass, A major donor to the Trump campaign, he is also one of TikTok’s largest American investors. Trump had notably pointed out a change on TikTok long before joining the app during the campaign.

“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to look at, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we have to keep this fool around for a while,'” Trump saying in Arizona last month.

The app’s ban is scheduled to take effect on January 19, NBC News reported. Francis said Friday that a TikTok ban would violate constitutional rights when jurists questioned the basis of his argument:

While the justices expressed some concerns about the law raising free speech issues, especially as it relates to the platform’s content moderation policies, they also seemed willing to defer to at least some of the national security justifications. from the government related to concerns about the collection of data from American users. .

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the government’s arguments about data collection were “very strong” but that concerns about the Chinese government’s control over the content “raise much more challenging questions.”

Chief Justice John Roberts also appeared reluctant to question Congress, citing its conclusions that ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws that require it to help with intelligence gathering.

“So, we’re supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate father is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” asked.

Among other questions raised by the justices was whether TikTok’s free speech rights are even at issue, given that the law targets its foreign owner, who may not be able to claim First Amendment protections.

Associated Justice Elena Kagan Francisco asked: “The only First Amendment rights are found on Tiktok, which does have First Amendment rights. And I guess my question is: How are those First Amendment rights actually involved here?”

NBC News reported that Francisco also claimed that TikTok could stop working in the US next week during an exchange with Associate Justice. Sonia Sotomayor.

The network concluded that the court’s judges were inclined “to uphold the law that could ban TikTok.”

Watch above via C-SPAN.