• by Wendy Davis , December 18, 2024

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to refuse to block a law that will ban TikTok unless it separates from parent company China-based ByteDance.

The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R. 7521), passed earlier this year, will prohibit app stores and websites from distributing TikTok unless it's sold by ByteDance by January 19. The statute provides that the U.S. president can extend that deadline by three months, but President Joe Biden, who will still be in office on that date, hasn't yet indicated whether he will do so.

TikTok, which argues that the law violates the First Amendment, earlier this week asked Supreme Court to halt the law pending an appeal. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court put off deciding whether to block the law, but said it would hear TikTok's challenge to the statute.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on January 10 -- nine days before the law is set to take effect.

The top Republican senator argues in a friend-of-the-court brief that the statute is consistent with the First Amendment because it aims to prevent a government -- in this case, the Chinese Communist Party -- from wielding control over speech on TikTok.

“The goal of the Foreign Adversaries Act is to further the highly compelling state interest of preventing Chinese Communist mining of American data and deployment of subversive enemy propaganda through algorithmic curation,” his attorneys wrote.

“The topsy-turvy idea that TikTok has an expressive right to facilitate the [Chinese Communist Party] censorship regime is absurd,” his lawyers write. “Would Congress have needed to allow Nikita Khrushchev to buy CBS and replace The Bing Crosby Show with Alexander Nevsky?”

Digital rights groups have weighed in on TikTok's side, arguing that the law represents a restriction on speech based on content.

“There is no legitimate (let alone compelling) interest in throttling Americans’ ability to receive information, even where the government regards that information as 'communist political propaganda' or 'the seeds of treason,” the ” the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday, quoting from a1965 Supreme Court decision invalidating a law that restricted postal delivery of foreign communist propaganda.