(The Tennessean)—Nashville content creators are bracing for life without TikTok.
The popular social media app is facing a potential ban after President Joe Biden signed the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April, which the app’s Chinese parent-company ByteDance to divest the app due to national security concerns.
But the ban faces legal challenges, and the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to take up the case Friday.
“TikTok has literally changed my entire life,” said Lea Bryant, a Nashville event planner and content creator on TikTok. “I didn’t know what to do with my life. Then suddenly, I started posting the content and living the dreams that I always prayed for. I’m able to have this type of life that I dreamed of — I am who I always wanted to be. If TikTok were to be banned, it would be such a defeat.”
According to the law, if TikTok does not transfer ownership of the app to a company without Chinese ties by Jan. 19, app stores will not be allowed to provide the app to U.S. customers, and U.S.-based servers will be banned from hosting the app.
Despite facing a First Amendment lawsuit in June, filed by the nonprofit legal group Liberty Justice Center, the law was upheld in a Washington D.C. federal court in December. But on Dec. 16, the Liberty Justice Center joined a group of TikTok creators in filing an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was granted.
“We believe the TikTok ban violates the free speech rights of the millions of Americans who use TikTok to share and hear ideas,” said Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center and a lead attorney on the case. “It shuts down an entire medium of communication, and really is unprecedented in how broadly it suppresses American speech.”
The potential ban troubles many Nashville residents, particularly young artists and entrepreneurs who make a substantial amount of their living based on the reach that TikTok provides them.
In a December amicus brief filed before the Supreme Court in support of TikTok, Nashville-based think tank The Future of Free Speech, along with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and several other civil liberties organizations, called the ban an “unprecedented departure” from the nation’s “longstanding commitment to free speech exceptionalism.”
“For decades, the United States has been the global gold standard for free speech protections,” said Jacob Mchangama, executive director of The Future of Free Speech. “The unprecedented bipartisan push to effectively shut down TikTok — an online platform where millions exercise their right to free expression and access information — represents a troubling shift from this proud legacy.”
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Lawyers argue that TikTok ban would violate free speech, despite security concerns
Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center, is the lead attorney for BASED Politics, a nonprofit educational political podcast on TikTok and one of the many plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the ban.
He said the Supreme Court needs to rule the law as unconstitutional because it would ban all speech on TikTok — even though nearly all of it is constitutionally protected.
“We argue that this law violates the free speech rights of our client — and the 170 million other Americans who use TikTok — to hear and share speech,” Hubert said.
The government’s main argument for the ban concerns national security. In court filings, the government argued that ByteDance — which is headquartered in Beijing — is subject to the laws of the People’s Republic of China and can therefore provide the highly sensitive data that TikTok collects from users’ phones to Chinese intelligence.
Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed worry over the national security implications of TikTok. Over the past year, for instance, U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, both Tennessee Republicans, have emphasized their concerns over potential misuse of data by the Chinese government.
But Huebert said the security concerns do not amount to a level that requires the banning of the app, as the law needs to clear the legal hurdle of “strict scrutiny” — a common First Amendment legal concept that requires the government prove a compelling and immediate reason to violate or restrict the First Amendment.
”The government tried to justify the law by invoking national security, and in particular, invoking the protection of Americans’ data privacy and the preventing of the Chinese government from making TikTok promote or suppress content in a way that would undermine the U.S. government’s interests,” he said.
That last part, Huebert said, is key to his argument that the law violates the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment exists to prevent the government from enacting laws to suppress speech that it thinks goes against its interests,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether speech goes against the government’s interest, it’s protected just the same, and that even includes speech that directly attacks our very form of government and our institutions directly.”
This is an excerpt of a longer article. To read the full piece, visit The Tennessean here.