Thomas A. Berry
Thomas A. Berry
In April 2024, President Biden signed an unprecedented law that required TikTok to either “divest” from its parent company ByteDance by January 19, 2025, or cease operations in the United States. Such divestment would likely be infeasible because ByteDance owns much of TikTok’s code and employs many of the engineers who make TikTok run. And even if it were feasible, American TikTok users would lose access to content from outside the country, fundamentally changing the platform.
The law contained an unusual provision requiring that any legal challenges be brought directly in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, bypassing the federal district courts. Pursuant to that requirement, three suits were brought in the DC Circuit challenging the law, one by TikTok itself and two by various TikTok users.
A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit upheld the law against these challenges, and now the Supreme Court has taken the cases on a fast-track timeline, with oral arguments scheduled for this Friday, January 10 (just nine days before the law’s deadline). Cato has filed an amicus brief urging the court to strike down the law as a First Amendment violation.
In our brief, we address two justifications for the law that were repeatedly invoked by lawmakers: that TikTok is a platform for “propaganda” and that it is a platform for “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As our brief explains, neither of these arguments can justify the law because there is no First Amendment exception for either “propaganda” or false speech.
The TikTok divestment bill is not the first time Congress has enacted a bill infringing on speech rights to combat foreign “propaganda.” In the 1960s, members of Congress used strikingly similar rhetoric to that used by lawmakers today when they passed a similar bill. That 1960s law mandated screening of incoming foreign mail for “Communist political propaganda.” If a government official determined that a piece of mail contained such propaganda, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-should-save-tiktok
