Content creators demonstrate in front of the U.S Capitol in 2024 in opposition to proposed legislation banning TikTok. Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the federal law passed last year to ban TikTok, accepting the government’s arguments that national security threats posed by the foreign ownership of TikTok’s parent company justify the ban.
This is despite U.S. officials acknowledging they have no actual evidence China is using TikTok to spy on Americans, and lawmakers having admitted the real reason for the ban is that they didn’t like what people were saying on TikTok, particularly about the Israel-Gaza war.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), commented:
“It’s particularly ironic that the Supreme Court is upholding the ban on national security grounds when both the incoming and outgoing presidents are backtracking from their prior support of the ban. Are they implying that neither administration cares about national security? It appears this ban was a political stunt that the Biden administration didn’t expect would ever become law. But now it has, and it might not even be enforced. All we might be left with at the end of the day is a Supreme Court opinion that weakens First Amendment freedoms on the internet.
The Supreme Court cites China’s law requiring Chinese companies to cooperate with government surveillance efforts, but omits that the U.S. Congress passed a law just last year allowing the government to involuntarily enlist U.S. businesses to spy on its behalf. This opinion practically begs foreign governments to ban American apps for the same reasons America banned TikTok. If we don’t like China’s practices on surveillance and censorship we should stop adopting them back home.”
Prior to the TikTok case, the Supreme Court had recognized that Americans are entitled to consume foreign propaganda if they so choose and that hypothetical national security harms are not an adequate justification for censoring speech. The Supreme Court avoided those issues by focusing on data privacy and glossing over free speech concerns.
But Stern said “a ban will not alleviate privacy threats posed by TikTok because the U.S. still does not have a comprehensive data privacy law. It may, however, shut down a platform millions of Americans, including journalists, use to speak freely.”
