TikTok’s legal team warned the Supreme Court of wider consequences if the popular Chinese-owned app is banned in the US, Reuters reports.
The app, owned by China-based ByteDance, is currently set to be banned in the US on Jan. 19 unless it’s sold to a different owner not controlled by a “foreign adversary.” TikTok has resisted calls for a sale and instead filed suit. The case made its way to the Supreme Court this week.
In oral arguments on Friday, Noel Francisco, a lawyer representing TikTok and ByteDance, said supporting the law could allow the US government to censor content it didn’t like in the future.
“AMC movie theaters used to be owned by a Chinese company. Under this theory, Congress could order AMC movie theaters to censor any movies that Congress doesn’t like or promote any movies that Congress wanted,” Francisco told the justices. He went on to claim that “everybody manipulates content,” pointing out that many people “think CNN, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times are manipulating their content.”
Jeffrey Fisher, a lawyer representing TikTok content creators challenging the law, questioned why TikTok may be subject to harsher restrictions than other Chinese-owned firms operating in the US. “Would a Congress [that is] really worried about these very dramatic risks leave out an e-commerce site like Temu that has 70 million Americans using it?” Fisher asked.
Fisher added that it is “very curious” to single out TikTok and “not other companies with tens of millions of people having their own data taken, you know, in the process of engaging with those websites and equally, if not more, available to Chinese control.”
Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the First Amendment is relevant to the case. “The law is only targeted at this foreign corporation, which doesn’t have First Amendment rights,” she said.
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Not all the legal arguments hinged on content manipulation or free speech grounds. US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the threat of China getting its hands on the data of US citizens is a serious enough reason to ban the app on its own, regardless of the threat of content manipulation by the Chinese government.
“I think that it should be beyond dispute that, of course, our nation has an enormous interest in keeping the sensitive data out of the hands of our foreign adversary,” said Prelogar. “And it should also be beyond dispute that our foreign adversary has an existing capability through its laws and through the way that these companies are integrated to get its hands on that data.”
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