TikTok ban upheld
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A Washington appeals court has turned away a challenge to a fast-approaching nationwide ban of short-video app TikTok unless it divests from Chinese ownership by Jan. 19, affirming the law as constitutional.
The D.C. Court of Appeals on Friday sided with the Justice Department, which argued that the U.S. government has the authority to ban TikTok based on the national security risk that the wildly popular social media platform could be pressured by the Chinese government to expose Americans’ data or influence what they see. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is based in China.
TikTok had argued to the three-judge panel, unsuccessfully, that the ban must be struck down for infringement on the free speech rights of the app’s users and owners under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” the court wrote in its opinion.
The court also said years-long bipartisan investigations into the app, and the government’s willingness to consider TikTok’s alternatives, weighed in favor of the law.
However, the judges said they rejected the government’s “ambitious argument” that the law did not “implicate the First Amendment at all,” saying that it would impose a “disproportionate burden on TikTok, an entity engaged in expressive activity.” The government had suggested that TikTok’s ownership by a foreign company left it without First Amendment rights, despite it having roughly 170 million U.S. accounts.
The decision sets up a potential showdown with President-elect Donald Trump. Having backed a ban during his first term in the White House, he said on the campaign trail that he would try to “save TikTok,” though many of his choices for key posts in his administration are China hawks who have supported outlawing U.S. access to the platform.
Trump is expected to try to halt the TikTok ban, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
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Overturned on Jan20?
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Going to be interesting. I assume you saw what Trump said at his news conference?
BTW, that was a helluva news conference, from a couple of angles...
- Biden is POTUS, not Trump. The questions directed at Trump were like he had already assumed office.
- 90 minutes, unscripted, no notes. Biden couldn't have done that four years ago. Harris has never been able to do it.
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Volokh: odds are against TikTok at SCOTUS.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/12/18/odds-are-against-tiktok-at-the-supreme-court/
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@jon-nyc said in TikTok ban upheld:
I didn’t. What did he say as regards CCP control of young Americans primary news source?
What he said was that on the advice of Barron, they put assets into a Tik-Tok campaign and were very pleased with the results...IIRC, a 20% or so uptick in young voters that saw their stuff.
Trump now knows it's an effective social media platform
What he deflected, was his exact stance on who should own the platform.
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From a law professor on possible steps by President tTrump if he wants to keep Tik Tok
One thing he could do - and this would be the most direct and the most effective thing - would be to get Congress to repeal the law, 'cause if the law is repealed, then the law is repealed, and there's no issue. The problem there is that it's going to be very hard to do that. The law was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. I mean, it was essentially as bipartisan as anything gets in contemporary Washington. And although, of course, Trump has a really strong hold on the Republican Party, and maybe some Democrats don't love the idea of banning TikTok, what they hear from their constituents, I am skeptical that Trump can get the votes - right? - that he - that even Trump has the political juice to get this thing done. And I think it would really have to be one of the main things he spends his political capital on in his first hundred days. I'm just not convinced he wants to do that.
the second thing he could do is he could just declare that the government is not going to enforce the law. So the law is enforced through primarily penalties on these companies. The attorney general goes and sues Apple and Oracle for violating the law up to $5,000 per user. And as you mentioned before, there are 170 million American users of TikTok, so that adds up to a lot of money very quickly. So just because he directs the attorney general not to enforce the law, that doesn't make the law go away. Apple and Oracle would still be in a position of violating the law. And again, if you're the general counsel of Apple - and certainly if I was - I would feel very uncomfortable telling my CEO to go ahead with an action that could potentially open my company up to billions of dollars in liability based on some Truth Social post that Trump made directing future Attorney General Pam Bondi not to enforce the law. So I don't think that's going to be good enough.
the third thing Trump can do, and this is - I think if he wants to help TikTok, this is probably how he's going to do it - is to just declare that the law no longer applies. And the reason he can do that is because the law bans TikTok unless ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, performs what's called - what the law calls a qualified divestiture - basically, a qualified sale. And then the law also defines what a qualified divestiture is. And it says a qualified divestiture is when the president determines, after an interagency process, that - and then there's a bunch of language about what's supposed to actually happen. TikTok is no longer owned by ByteDance; TikTok is no longer owned or controlled by a Chinese entity, and so on and so forth. But if you just focus on the first few words of that definition, the president determines - well, that does give the president some power.
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@taiwan_girl said in TikTok ban upheld:
the third thing Trump can do, and this is - I think if he wants to help
TikTokthe CCP, this is probably how he's going to do it - is to just declare that the law no longer applies. And the reason he can do that is because the law bans TikTok unless ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, performs what's called - what the law calls a qualified divestiture - basically, a qualified sale. And then the law also defines what a qualified divestiture is. And it says a qualified divestiture is when the president determines, after an interagency process, that - and then there's a bunch of language about what's supposed to actually happen. TikTok is no longer owned by ByteDance; TikTok is no longer owned or controlled by a Chinese entity, and so on and so forth. But if you just focus on the first few words of that definition, the president determines - well, that does give the president some power. -
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