As of today, TikTok has 11 days left in the US. The site will be banned from app stores on January 19 unless something dramatic happens before then. What TikTok is hoping will happen is a last minute intervention by the Supreme Court.
TikTok, the popular social media platform celebrated for its frothy mix of dance videos, cat antics, news clips and recipes, will wage a substantial First Amendment battle at the Supreme Court on Friday…
TikTok is appealing a formidable lower court ruling that highlighted security threats, specifically the US government’s concern that Beijing will amass data on American users and covertly manipulate TikTok’s content for espionage and other damaging purposes…
The company and the content creators challenging the impending ban have strategically ramped up their arguments on the dangers of suppressing speech, even if propaganda from a foreign adversary. TikTok has also switched up its legal team for Friday’s arguments. It will be represented at the courtroom lectern by Noel Francisco, a former US solicitor general from Donald Trump’s first term.
The problem TikTok is facing now, besides running out of time, is that the lower court decision they are appealing was unanimous and was written by a Reagan appointee who focused on the potential for Chinese abuse of the platform.
In the opinion by Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a 1986 appointee of Ronald Reagan, the DC Circuit found the government had “compelling” interests in countering China’s efforts to collect data about American users and in countering the risk of covert manipulation of TikTok content. Ginsburg was joined by Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee and former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.
The third judge, an Obama appointee named Sri Srinivasan, also agreed. He wrote, “It is a modus operandi of the PRC to surreptitiously access data through its control over companies like ByteDance. … Even if the PRC has yet to discernibly act on its potential control over ByteDance’s access to data on American users in particular, Congress did not need to wait for the risk to become realized and the damage to be done before taking action to avert it.”
In other words, we know China wants to steal US data and we know it has access to anything ByteDance gathers. Just because we can’t prove they’ve abused this power so far doesn’t mean they haven’t already or won’t in the future.
We are still trying to get Chinese hackers connected to the government out of our telecom systems. The idea that China wouldn’t abuse it’s position of control over ByteDance is laughable. Hopefully the Supreme Court will uphold the ban. […]
— Read More: hotair.com
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