TikTok lawsuit over potential US app ban invokes free-speech concerns

TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance are officially taking the US government to court over an April law requiring it to change ownership or face a national ban within a year.

The explosively popular short-form video platform filed a petition Tuesday in the District of Columbia US Circuit Court of Appeals that claims the divestment order prioritizes stated national security concerns over the free flow of ideas.

“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide,” the platform claims in its lawsuit.

Lawmakers cited national security concerns as the motive for the ban, and ByteDance has balked at the idea of divesting. Some, however, point to posts on the app about the Israel-Hamas war as a motivating factor in pushing for a ban.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the legal challenge “important” in a press release, noting that “we expect it to succeed.”

“Restricting citizens’ access to media from abroad is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, so it’s sad and alarming to see our own government going down this road,” he wrote in the release. “The First Amendment means the government can’t restrict Americans’ access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here.”

For some, including Jaffer, there’s a clear nexus between the TikTok ban and a desire to curb social media dialogue about the Israel-Hamas war that’s often critical of Israel and the US government’s involvement. The Intercept recently reported that Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who co-sponsored legislation supporting the ban, tied the platform to recent student protests on university campuses.

The outlet said Lawler remarked on a Zoom call that the campus protest movement “highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.

The theme also came up during a May 4 conversation at the McCain Institute between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney as the two discussed how Israel and the US have seen such “awful” PR.

On social media, “context, history, facts get lost and the emotion, the impact of images, dominates. We can’t discount that,” Blinken said. “But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Romney, a Utah Republican, responded that “some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok.” He then claimed that “if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

Jaffer suggested that comments along these lines could trip up the government’s defense in court.

“The fact that some legislators have acknowledged that the ban was motivated by a desire to suppress content about the Israel-Gaza conflict will make the law especially difficult for the government to defend,” he said in the press release.