US supreme court to hear arguments in TikTok ban-or-sale case
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Latest battle over whether to ban the app will force justices to weigh importance of security with freedom of speech. 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. 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.
