(The Sacramento Bee)—Court watchers take notice—the TikTok ban is about to have its day in court. The D.C. Court of Appeals will hear arguments Monday, Sept. 16, for and against the ban, which Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this year. The feds argue that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, which could use the massive social media platform to spread election misinformation and propaganda to the more than 170 million Americans—including 16 million Californians—who use it.
The law gave ByteDance nine months to sell the platform or else it would be banned. The ban faces a three-pronged challenge: from TikTok itself, from a group of TikTok content creators, and from the group BASED Politics, Inc., which produces videos espousing libertarian ideals targeting the Generation Z demographic. The latter is represented by the libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group Liberty Justice Center. The Bee recently caught up with Center President Jacob Huebert, who offered a preview of what arguments we can expect to hear next Monday.
“Our argument is that this shuts down the free speech rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok to share or hear content, including often political ideas,” he said. He added that a government shutdown of TikTok would block content creators like BASED Inc. from reaching the audience they want to reach. Huebert argued that the congressional ban was arbitrary, pointing out that it picks on TikTok in particular, while leaving other apps, including those with ties to China like Temu, alone.
The potential TikTok ban took on new relevance recently, when a Brazilian judge, and later the nation’s high court, ordered the social media platform X blocked, after owner Elon Musk refused to ban several accounts which the government contended were spreading election misinformation. Could what happened in Brazil happen here? Huebert argued that a TikTok ban “leaves the door open for a president in the future to decide other social media platforms are foreign-controlled and decide that they need to divest.”
He said that the government’s entire argument—that China will use the platform to spread misinformation and that users can just migrate to another platform—is “speculative.” Huebert said that TikTok offers something unique, “and so there isn’t a substitute for this. That audience may simply go away.” Huebert wryly noted that if the U.S. government is so worried about the dangers of TikTok, “it’s really curious that the Vice President of the United States has a TikTok account.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ political rival, former President Donald Trump, also has a TikTok account. He has been a vocal opponent of the TikTok ban, going so far as to campaign against it. But don’t expect this to be the last chapter in this particular legal battle. No matter how the D.C. Court of Appeals decides, Huebert said that he expects the U.S. Supreme Court to take the matter up this fall.
Read the full issue of Capitol Alert at the Sacramento Bee.