The Supreme Court of the United States has decided to take into consideration a proposal for TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, to block the law aimed at forcing the sale of the app by January 19 or face a ban on national security grounds.
The judges have not acted immediately on the emergency request from TikTok and ByteDance, as well as some of their platform users, for a court order to stop impending banopting instead to hear arguments on the matter on January 10.
The plaintiffs are appealing a lower court ruling that upheld this law. Congress passed the measure in April and the Justice Department said that as a Chinese company, TikTok poses “a national security threat of immense depth and scale” due to its access to large amounts of data on American users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate the content Americans see on the app. TikTok has said it does not pose a threat to US security.
On December 16, TikTok and ByteDance asked the Supreme Court to suspend the law, which they claimed violates privacy protections. freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitutionwhich was rejected shortly after by the Court of Appeals. The companies claimed that shutting down the app for a single month would cause TikTok to lose approximately a third of its users in the country and undermine its ability to attract advertisers and recruit content creators and talented employees.
In their filing before the Supreme Court, TikTok and ByteDance have stated that “if Americans, duly informed of the alleged risks of manipulation of ‘covert’ content, they choose to continue viewing content on TikTok with their eyes wide open, the First Amendment entrusts them with the task of making that decision, free from Government censorship.”
donald trumpwho tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, has changed his stance and promised during this year’s presidential race that I would try to save this social network. The president-elect announced on December 16 that he has “a warm place” in his heart “for TikTok” and that he would “take a look” at the matter. The Republican will take office on January 20, the day after the ‘app’ deadline.
The dispute comes at a time of rising trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies after the Biden administration would impose new restrictions on Chinese industry of chips and the Asian giant responded with a ban on exports of gallium, germanium and antimony to the US.
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