The Supreme Court agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge to a law that could ban the platform in the United States.
“The Act will shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration,” the platform argued. “This, in turn, will silence the speech of Applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts, and other matters of public concern.”
“Applicants—as well as countless small businesses who rely on the platform—also will suffer substantial and unrecoverable monetary and competitive harms,” TikTok continued. “Applicants and the public will therefore suffer immediate irreparable injury absent interim relief.”
In its statement granting the challenge, the Supreme Court wrote, “The parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.”
The social media platform will be given two hours to present its oral argument.
A federal appeals court recently upheld the law that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app by January 19 or be banned in the United States.
“We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users. Unless TikTok executes a qualified divestiture by January 19, 2025 — or the President grants a 90-day extension based upon progress towards a qualified divestiture, § 2(a)(3) — its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time,” the court added, noting that TikTok users will “need to find alternative media of communication.”
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court explained. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
