‘Go dark’: TikTok on the verge of being switched off
Owners of the hugely popular app said it could be switched off in a matter of days.
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A lawyer for social media giant TikTok has warned the hugely popular app could “go dark” if a proposed US ban is upheld by the highest court in the land.
It appeared likely the US Supreme Court would uphold a law that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the wildly popular online video-sharing platform or shut it down, during a court hearing on Friday local time.
A majority of the conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member bench appeared sceptical of arguments by TikTok’s lawyer that forcing a sale was a violation of First Amendment free speech rights.
Signed by President Joe Biden in April, the law passed by Congress would block TikTok, which boasts 170 million American users, from US app stores and web hosting services unless ByteDance divests from the social media platform by January 19.
The US government alleges TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users and is a conduit to spread propaganda.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued before the court that the app’s Chinese ownership “exposes our nation as a whole to a risk of espionage and blackmail”.
“There is a distinct, sovereign harm to the US if our foreign adversary could collect this massive data set about 170 million Americans.”
China and ByteDance strongly deny the claims.
“This case ultimately boils down to speech,” TikTok counsel Noel Francisco said during two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments.
“What we’re talking about is ideas. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government cannot restrict speech.”
Several of the justices pushed back, pointing to TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
“There’s a good reason for saying that a foreign government, particularly an adversary, does not have free speech rights in the United States,” said Justice Samuel Alito.
“Why would it all change if it was simply hidden under some kind of contrived corporate structure?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts raised the national security concerns behind the law — the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
“I think Congress and the president were concerned that China was accessing information about millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, including teenagers, people in their 20s,” Justice Kavanaugh said.
Their concern, he added, was “that they would use that information over time to develop spies to turn people, to blackmail people, people who a generation from now will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department”.
Justice Roberts asked the lawyer for TikTok whether the court is “supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?”
Mr Francisco said Congress could have chosen other means to address its concerns such as requiring data from TikTok’s US users not be allowed to be shared with anybody.
“They never even considered that most obvious alternative” of saying “you can’t give it to ByteDance, you can’t give it to China, you can’t give it to Google, you can’t give it to Amazon,” he said.
Mr Francisco was asked what happens after January 19 if ByteDance declines to sell TikTok.
“We go dark,” he said. “Essentially the platform shuts down.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett took issue with Francisco’s characterisation.
“You keep saying shut down,” Justice Barrett said. “The law doesn’t say TikTok has to shut down. It says ByteDance has to divest. If ByteDance divested TikTok, we wouldn’t be here, right?”
Jeffrey Fisher, who appeared on behalf of content creators, argued any ban would restrict the rights of Americans to work for whatever company they want.
“American creators have a right to work with publishers of their choice,” he said.
Mr Fisher also questioned why a similar ban was not being extended to other Chinese-owned platforms, such as the online shopping app Temu.
Ms Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, also raised national security concerns, calling Chinese government control of TikTok a “grave threat.”
“The Chinese government could weaponise TikTok at any time to harm the United States,” Ms Prelogar said.
“There is no protected First Amendment right for a foreign adversary to exploit its control over a speech platform.”
The potential ban could strain US-China relations just as Donald Trump prepares to be sworn in as president on January 20.
Mr Trump, who has 14.7 million followers on TikTok, has emerged as an unlikely ally of the platform - in a reversal from his first term, when the Republican leader tried to ban the app.
His lawyer, John Sauer, filed a brief with the Supreme Court last month asking it to pause the law, “thus permitting President Trump’s incoming Administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”
In an 11th hour development on Thursday, US billionaire Frank McCourt announced that he had put together a consortium to acquire TikTok’s US assets from ByteDance.
“We look forward to working with ByteDance, President-elect Trump, and the incoming administration to get this deal done,” Mr McCourt said.
AFP, among more than a dozen other fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok in several countries to verify videos that potentially contain false information
Originally published as ‘Go dark’: TikTok on the verge of being switched off
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