Dec 27 (Reuters) – Free speech advocates told the United States Supreme Court on Friday that US legislation against TikTok, which is based in China, resembles censorship regimes imposed by authoritarian enemies of the US.
In an amicus curiae brief, PEN America, Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and Free Press asked the nation’s highest court to strike down the federal law that seeks to ban or force the sale of TikTok.
They argue that the law not only threatens to illegally block Americans from accessing foreign media in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, but also “recalls practices that have long been associated with repressive governments.”
They noted that communists in the Soviet Union and China blocked Western radio broadcasts after World War II, while modern-day Russia and China have a series of restrictions on websites and apps such as Facebook, X and YouTube.
TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are fighting to keep the popular app running in the United States, after Congress approved, in April, a ban on its service if the company does not sell it by January 19th.
The Department of Justice said that, as a Chinese company, TikTok poses “a national security threat of immense depth and scale” because it can access so much data on American users.
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Judges accepted the government’s argument that it is acting only to protect the US from an “adversarial foreign nation” and prevent Beijing from obtaining Americans’ data.
Free speech advocates have argued that any attempt to protect Americans’ data would be more successful through laws that embrace privacy, rather than simply banning a popular form of speech.
Their defense cited that if the law prevails, the US will ironically join China in banning TikTok. Chinese authorities only allow the use of the domestic version of the app, called Douyin, which is subject to strong censorship.
