The issue of Americans’ access to TikTok has become a political hotspot in the country, with Republican candidate Donald Trump opposing a ban on the popular app.
Democratic President Joe Biden, whose vice president Kamala Harris is running against Trump, signed the law that gives Tik Tok Until January to give up its Chinese ownership under penalty of being banned from the US market.
She said Byte DanceTikTok’s parent company said it has no plans to sell the app, leaving the company’s legal challenge, which focuses on U.S. guarantees of free speech, as its only option to continue.
A decision to ban TikTok would provoke a strong reaction from the Chinese government and exacerbate existing tensions in US-China relations.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Washington, D.C., will hear arguments from TikTok, ByteDance and a number of users.
They will argue that the law violates the right to freedom of expression.
The justices will announce their decision in the coming weeks or months, but regardless of the outcome, the case will likely reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
“There is no doubt that the law will force TikTok to shut down the app by January 19, 2025,” and “silence those who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated anywhere else,” TikTok’s appeal said.
TikTok said that even if a sale were possible, the app “would still be less influential and deprived of the expressive technological innovation that tailors content to each user.”
The app says it has “the Constitution on our side” and is pushing for a ruling that would benefit TikTok and its 170 million American users.
The US government responds that the law addresses national security concerns, not free speech, and that ByteDance cannot exercise its First Amendment rights in the United States.
“Given TikTok’s widespread reach within the United States, China’s ability to use TikTok’s features to further its overarching goal of undermining U.S. interests creates a national security threat of significant scale and scope,” the Justice Department said in its filing.
The United States says ByteDance can and will comply with Chinese government demands for data on American users, or bow to Chinese government pressure to censor or promote content on the platform.
Vote for Trump
TikTok first came under scrutiny under the Trump administration, which unsuccessfully tried to ban it.
Those efforts stalled when a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s move, in part because it could violate free speech rights.
Trump has since changed his position.
“To all those who want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” he said in a video he posted last week.
In a measure of the app’s popularity, Biden’s re-election campaign created a TikTok account earlier this year.
Biden has dropped out of the race, but Harris, the candidate in his place, is still on the app, as social media has embraced it as a way to connect with younger voters.
The new law signed by Biden allows for overcoming previous legal obstacles that Trump faced, but some experts believe that it will be difficult for the US Supreme Court to allow national security considerations to take precedence over the protection of free speech.
Many of the US side’s national security arguments are sealed, which “complicates efforts to evaluate them,” Professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law told AFP.
“But the U.S. Supreme Court has generally been very cautious about accepting national security defenses when government regulations restrict First Amendment rights, especially those relating to the Internet,” Tobias said.
