On December 27, the Liberty Justice Center filed an opening brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in its constitutional challenge to the federal law that will effectively ban TikTok as of January 19. The Supreme Court announced that it would hear the Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit in an order issued last week, which scheduled oral arguments for January 10, 2025.
In today’s filing, the Liberty Justice Center urges the Supreme Court to strike down the proposed TikTok ban before it takes effect on January 19—the day before the presidential inauguration—because of the damage the ban would do to the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.
“The TikTok ban represents an unprecedented act of censorship by the American government. Unless the Supreme Court strikes it down, the ban will silence an entire platform where millions of Americans engage in political speech that’s at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection,” said Jacob Huebert, President of the Liberty Justice Center.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court took up our challenge to the ban, and we will continue to fight for the First Amendment rights of our client, BASED Politics, as well as the 170 million other TikTok users and creators across the country whose constitutional rights would be violated by this ban,” Huebert continued.
In today’s brief, the Liberty Justice Center argues that the government cannot justify shutting down the speech of the millions of Americans who use TikTok. The Department of Justice has asserted that the ban serves to prevent the Chinese government from manipulating content on the platform in a way that could undermine the American government’s interests or affect U.S. elections. The Liberty Justice Center argues that suppressing views which the government disapproves of is a reason why the ban is unconstitutional, not a reason why the ban is justified. The Liberty Justice Center’s brief also rebuts arguments that the ban is necessary to protect Americans’ data privacy; in fact, the ban only targets TikTok and (potentially) other applications on which people can engage in political expression, without touching other Chinese apps that collect Americans’ data.
American TikTok users have an urgent need to engage in political speech immediately following the inauguration and will therefore suffer immediate and irreparable harm if the ban is enacted. In particular, the Liberty Justice Center’s client BASED Politics—a nonprofit that uses social media platforms including TikTok to publish educational content on free markets and individual rights—would suffer harm because the ban would prevent BASED Politics from communicating with its audience about President Trump’s actions upon taking office.
The Liberty Justice Center filed its First Amendment lawsuit challenging the ban in June, on behalf of BASED Politics, a nonprofit organization that uses TikTok to share ideas about individual liberty and free markets with a Gen Z audience that it cannot reach anywhere else.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed the lawsuit without ruling on the proposed ban’s threat to the First Amendment, the Liberty Justice Center filed an emergency petition on December 16 urging the Supreme Court to take up the case. The Supreme Court granted the petition on December 18, combining the Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit with two other challenges to the ban—one filed by a group of TikTok creators and one by TikTok and its parent company ByteDance—for oral arguments in January.
BASED Politics Inc. v. Garland was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on June 6, 2024.
The Liberty Justice Center’s legal filings in BASED Politics Inc. v. Garland are available here.