TikTok Took a Beating at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court appeared largely—though not entirely—unmoved by arguments that a federal ban on TikTok would violate the First Amendment rights of the app’s millions of American users.
During oral arguments before the Court on Friday, the justices seemed inclined to agree with the federal government that a national security rationale was sufficient to force the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell to an American company. That sale must take place before January 19, or else TikTok will disappear from smartphones.
President-elect Donald Trump opposes the ban and petitioned the Court to delay it until he takes office so that an alternative can be worked out. Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary and billionaire Frank McCourt have offered to buy the app for $20 billion, but ByteDance has insisted that it would sooner comply with the ban than sell the company. Supporters of the ban tend to see this as evidence that the Chinese government deems TikTok too useful for its nefarious propagandistic purposes.
Of course, even if it were true that the app is rife with Chinese propaganda, Americans enjoy the First Amendment right to consume such content. The justices seemed most skeptical of the government’s case to the extent it hinged on this point. Justice Elena Kagan likened the banning of TikTok to the Red Scare, in which the federal government violated the free speech rights of American communists due to their affiliation with the Soviet Union.
“That’s exactly what they thought about Communist Party
Article from Reason.com
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