The Supreme Court needs to step in before the January TikTok ban, the ACLU says

Update: December 18, 2024, 11:36 am EST The story was updated after the US Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to the TikTok ban.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a formal petition to the US Supreme Court to block the expected ban on TikTok, which is facing the social media company as January approaches. At the time, TikTok was making its own case for intervention – and the court has now answered the call.

“The Constitution sets an unusually high bar for this type of mass surveillance. The Supreme Court must take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world,” wrote the ACLU’s deputy director. National Security Project Patrick Toomey on appeal. An amicus brief was submitted on December 17 by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

On Dec. 18, the US Supreme Court officially agreed to hear the challenges filed by TikTok and ByteDance, with oral arguments scheduled for Jan. 10.

TikTok and its partners have called the ban a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech, and the company has always denied any contact with Chinese government intelligence or the sharing of US user data, which is the main reason for the forced removal of TikTok from Chinese ownership.

Despite the high court’s decision, the ban, signed by President Biden in April, will go into effect on January 19. TikTok could have parted ways with its parent company, ByteDance, to comply with the law and end the ban altogether, but it has ruled out any sale, likely pending another court decision. . Earlier this week, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals denied an emergency injunction filed by TikTok that would delay the ban’s effect until the Supreme Court could issue an opinion under stricter scrutiny. The appeals court argued that there was too much scrutiny, and that national security interests justified the US government’s action.

The ACLU and its allies argued that the court’s reasoning was incorrect. “The DC Circuit failed to fully address the profound legal implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok,” the ACLU wrote. “While the lower court’s decision rightly recognized that the law creates First Amendment scrutiny, it did not address First Amendment users’ interest in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also ironically tried to block the government’s ban on TikTok as a way to justify the assertion of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not.”

The ACLU has maintained that TikTok’s ban is a violation of federally protected rights, including free speech, calling the aggressive marketing “unconstitutional” in a statement released in March. A few months earlier the human rights organization argued that banning any such social media application would be “a dangerous act of censorship.”

Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote: “Depriving citizens of access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes.” here.”