TikTok’s Supreme Court Press
TikTok’s two-pronged approach – the second being its application to the Supreme Court – to try and get the ban overturned was prompted by a failure earlier this month to convince the US appeals court to overturn the ban.
The document filed by TikTok Inc and ByteDance Ltd calls the ban a “massive and unprecedented speech restriction”. It leans on the contemporaneous timing of the ban with Trump’s inauguration, saying it will “silence the speech of [TikTok] and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts, and other matters of public concern”.
“The court’s flawed legal rationales would open the door to upholding content-based speech bans in contexts far different than this one. Fear-mongering about national security cannot obscure the threat that the Act itself poses to all Americans.”
The allusion of TikTok as a ‘speech platform’ has been a running theme of the company’s resistance to a ban that it says encroaches First Amendment rights. It’s original appeal application in September said that the law is an “extraordinary intrusion on free speech rights”.
