A majority of the Supreme Court appeared likely to uphold a controversial ban on TikTok over concerns about its ties to China, with justices lobbing pointed questions at lawyers for the social media app and a group of its content creators.
During more than two hours of oral arguments, many of the justices appeared to view the sell-or-ban law approved by Congress in April not as one that primarily implicates the First Amendment but rather as an effort to regulate the potential foreign control of an app used by 170 million Americans.
CNN reports the law, which would restrict the app’s operations in the United States if its Chinese-based parent company ByteDance did not divest from the platform, is set to take effect on January 19 unless the high court steps in to block it temporarily. A decision on that question – the ban’s implementation date – could come quickly, long before the justices resolve any underlying questions about speech protections.
Justices across the ideological spectrum raised doubts that the TikTok ban even implicated the First Amendment. That’s a bad sign for TikTok, because to win, it had to prove first that the First Amendment applies in the case and then that the law has failed to meet its tests.
In an exchange with a lawyer for users of the application, Chief Justice John Roberts said that, in passing the law, Congress was “fine with the expression.”
“They’re not fine with a foreign adversary, as they’ve determined it is, gathering all this information about the 170 million people who use TikTok,” he said.
Roberts also pressed TikTok’s lawyer on the lack of precedent of the court striking down a law, on First Amendment grounds, that was crafted around regulating a company’s corporate structure.
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