Parties file final briefs in TikTok case before Supreme Court hearing
SCOTUS NEWS
on Jan 3, 2025
at 7:55 pm
TikTok’s U.S. headquarters in Culver City, Calif. (Tada Images via Shutterstock)
One week ahead of oral arguments in its challenge to a federal law that would require social-media giant TikTok to shut down in the United States unless its parent company can sell it by Jan. 19, the Biden administration filed its reply brief on Friday, urging the justices to allow the law to go into effect. The law, U.S. The law, U.S. The Supreme Court heard arguments on December 16 after a federal appeals court upheld a law in early December and refused to suspend it. This prompted TikTok to file a brief with the Supreme Court. The companies claim that the government’s argument that TikTok has no First Amendment rights is “unambiguously” refuted by its record. This is because the company cannot change the algorithm it uses to make recommendations to TikTok’s users. By “implementing the recommendation engines on the U.S. platforms,” TikTok, and ByteDance explained that TikTok is “making the engine its own,” and acting as the publisher for the platform. They say that such concerns “justify” restricting speech when the government is trying to avert an imminent, concrete threat. But in this instance, the creators emphasize, the government only asserts “that the content on TikTok could persuade Americans with different social or Our history, tradition, and precedent render the goal of limiting such speech constitutionally illegitimate.”
Moreover, the creators continued, there is a less draconian alternative to address these concerns. If, they suggested, “the worry is that Americans do not know the government thinks the curation of videos on their TikTok feeds might be influenced by the Chinese government, providing that information would fully address that risk without any need for censorship.”
And the creators dismissed the government’s contention that the law also seeks to protect against misappropriation of TikTok users’ data as “just the tail seeking to wag the dog.” The government, they stressed, “concedes that China has never coerced ByteDance into misappropriating TikTok user data.”
The Biden administration reiterated its argument that the law does not regulate TikTok’s speech. The Biden administration reiterated its argument that the law does not regulate TikTok’s speech. Although TikTok, the creators and ByteDance characterize the act as an “effort to suppress disfavored viewpoints,” it contended that once ByteDance The Act targets control by a foreign adversary, not protected speech,” Prelogar emphasized, and it does so to prevent that foreign adversary from covertly manipulating the content on TikTok, regardless of the views expressed there.
Prelogar insisted that TikTok and the creators offered no real response to the government’s concerns about protecting the data of TikTok’s U.S. users. She wrote that TikTok, and its creators, argued that the government could not rely on the need for data protection because Congress would have not passed the law solely for that purpose. Prelogar said that Congress had considered evidence that TikTok collects data on an unprecedented scale and that ByteDance has a history of abusing this data (by, for example, tracking U.S. journalists). Indeed, she said, “Congress considered evidence that TikTok collects data on an unsurpassed scale and that ByteDance has a history of abusing that data (by, for example, tracking U.S. journalists).”
Prelogar also pushed back against the plea made by President-elect Donald Trump, in a “friend of the court” brief last week, for the justices to delay the law’s effective date to give him time “to pursue a negotiated resolution.” Such a suggestion, she observed, is really a request for a temporary injunction, which would require TikTok to show that it is likely to prevail on the merits – something, she wrote, it has not done.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
