TikTok’s fate is in the hands of the Supreme Court
The name is good but no one stops to read it letter of the Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, which Congress and the President Joe Biden legislated last year, it is suspected that its purpose was to give TikTok and its foreign owners an ultimatum: sell the hugely popular app to a US-based company or cease operations in the country before a certain date. Can the government do that? That that day happened to be the last day of the sitting president’s term was most important — as if the political branches had decided that it was in the interest of keeping the US version of TikTok under government control Chinese government is too high to ignore. the whims of voters.
That legislative choice already exists. Because now that Donald Trump is the president-elect, and the new Congress has made it clear that he cannot have “a big and beautiful bill” to fund his tax cuts And an extension of the deportation machine he wants to set in motion, it is simply unknown how the incoming commander-in-chief will plan to deal with bipartisan consensus that TikTok’s days are numbered—unless and until the People’s Republic of China awards it to a suitable bidder. That won’t happen: China has arguably done everything but chose to close in the US if still fails.
The so-called TikTok ban, set to take effect in 10 days, is now in the hands of a conservative-majority Supreme Court, which has its own history of moving whichever way the wind blows. Just before the holidays, the justices agreed run fast a last-ditch effort by TikTok and Chinese-controlled tech giant ByteDance, along with a group of content creators, to block divestment or deportation laws. Their primarily and the only argument is that the First Amendment to the Constitution prevents the US government from shutting down a platform that approximately 170 million users rely on to disseminate and consume news, entertainment, culture, etc. Assembly will do not make laws They say they are cutting back on sharing these things.
Or maybe it? The past, present and future solicitors general of the United States – the title given to the government’s top Supreme Court lawyer – all have different views on this question and the case. how it will happen. For their part, TikTok and ByteDance have moved on Noel Francisco, by Trump former solicitor general and has been a key defender of everything from travel bans targeting Muslims to failed efforts to to kill the Affordable Care Act And Protect the dreamers. Stay with Francisco and his team seeCongress is “silencing a speech platform used by half the country” and so its ban must follow highest form judicial oversight—the kind that virtually no government action can survive.
To make this case, the company more or less argues that it should be treated the same as an American publisher given its editorial choices—and its powerful algorithm, which identifies dance videos or TikTok challenges appear in users’ feeds, like a newspaper deciding which articles to put in front of readers. “If Washington Post used an algorithm to email subscribers articles based entirely on the subscriber’s predicted interests, which would be an editorial choice – a decision to target readers with content they might want, instead of what editors think they should read,” Francisco write in a legal brief. “The First Amendment fully protects such editorial choices.”
TikTok must be really liked Parcel the analogy, if not the article location in the national address, because later in the same summary, Francisco put forward a hypothesis in which Congress attempted to Jeff Bezos sell the newspaper because lawmakers fear that the breadth of his transnational business entanglements could lead foreign rivals to pressure him to steer the newspaper industry in ways that benefit them . “That law would clearly burden his First Amendment rights,” Francisco added.
the current solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who will lose his job at noon on Inauguration Day, will have one last chance to make an impression about where power lies. She brieflike others during her tenure, expressed a maximalist view of Congress and the president’s prerogative to protect national security. And the divestment order, in this regard, has nothing to do with the First Amendment. “Congress and the Executive Branch determined that ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable threat to national security, because that relationship could enable Foreign adversary governments collect intelligence and manipulate the content that TikTok users in the US receive, even when those harms have not yet materialized.”
The government’s two basic grounds for promulgating this law – espionage and data mining threats by a foreign adversary and the ability to manipulate content in ways that could influence U.S. users—not just academic. That TikTok unauthorized IN China, everywhere, is compelling evidence that ByteDance is well aware of the app’s power to persuade people with content that only ByteDance’s closely guarded algorithm knows how to curate. That is, ByteDance demands freedom of speech here, not at home. (The company operates a TikTok-like alternative, Douyin, in China.) As the United States welcomes a new presidential administration, it is ready float a new world ordernot difficult to imagine a future in which China relies on TikTok to protect its interests at home and abroad.
