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first amendment
Lawmakers, Civil Society Groups Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
"Banning this social media platform would trample on the constitutional rights of over 170 million Americans."
Dec 27, 2024
Update (December 28):
On Friday evening, President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief with the Supreme Court that took no position on whether a ban on TikTok would violate First Amendment rights. Instead, he wrote that he has "consummate deal-making expertise," and as president would be able to "negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government."
Trump touted his understanding of social media, noting that he has 14.7 million followers on TikTok. He also said the timing of the impending ban—one day before he takes office–interferes with his "ability to manage the United States’ foreign policy and to pursue a resolution" that will preserve the app in the United States and protect national security.
Earlier:
Ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court's scheduled hearing on social media company TikTok's appeal regarding a ban on the popular platform, three bipartisan lawmakers were among the First Amendment advocates who filed amicus briefs in support of the app on Friday.
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were joined by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in asking the court to grant TikTok an emergency injunction to block the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act from banning the app on January 19 unless the platform's Chinese parent company sells its stake by then.
The law and its ban on TikTok would "deprive millions of Americans of their First Amendment rights," said the lawmakers.
"The TikTok ban does not survive First Amendment scrutiny," Markey, Paul, and Khanna added. "Its principal justification—preventing covert content manipulation by the Chinese government—reflects a desire to control the content on the TikTok platform and in any event could be achieved through a less restrictive alternative."
The law was signed by President Joe Biden in April over the objections of First Amendment advocates, and a federal appeals court upheld the ban earlier this month. The Supreme Court then agreed to hear TikTok's challenge.
The ACLU, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and the Freedom of the Press Foundation were among several civil liberties groups that also filed a amicus brief on Friday, arguing that the government has not presented sufficient evidence that the app, which is used by 170 million Americans, causes "ongoing or imminent harm."
Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said the government's attempt to ban Americans from using TikTok, which some creators use to share commentary on geopolitical events as well as weighing in on pop culture and creating humorous videos, is "extraordinary and unprecedented."
"This social media platform has allowed people around the world to tell their own stories in key moments of social upheaval, war, and natural disaster while reaching immense global audiences," Toomey said.
TikTok, he said, is "a unique forum for expression online—and the connections and community that so many have built there cannot be easily replaced. TikTok creators can't simply transfer their audiences and followers to another app, and TikTok users can't simply reassemble the many voices they've discovered on the platform."
At CDT, Free Expression Project director Kate Ruane said the groups' amicus brief "makes clear that national security interests do not diminish protections afforded by the First Amendment and that courts must impose the same rigorous standards to laws that restrict speech."
"It further argues that the D.C. Circuit misapplied strict scrutiny when it failed to significantly examine the government's vague and nonspecific national security justifications for enacting the statute," said Ruane. "In light of the law's sweeping ban on free expression, the coalition's brief argues that the court should block implementation of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act."
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Free Speech Coalition Vows to Defend Nonprofits From 'Unprecedented' Threat
"Presenting a strong and united front against political and ideological censorship is the only way to protect Americans' right to stand up for what they believe in under the First Amendment," said a spokesperson for Americans Against Government Censorship.
Dec 17, 2024
An alliance of labor unions and advocacy groups launched a new coalition on Tuesday aimed at defending nonprofit organizations from "unprecedented government attacks on free speech," a move that comes amid a Republican-led effort to empower the incoming Trump administration to shutter dissenting organizations.
Americans Against Government Censorship—whose founding members include the AFL-CIO, Oxfam America, Service Employees International Union, and Indivisible—said it was founded to combat the threat posed by bills such as H.R. 9495, which would allow the U.S. Treasury Department to unilaterally strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if they're deemed supporters of terrorism.
The legislation, which the ACLU said provides merely an "illusion of due process" for accused groups, represents a potentially existential threat to human rights organizations, news outlets, government watchdogs, and other nonprofits that could be key to uncovering and fighting abuses by the incoming administration.
"This sweeping authority could be weaponized against any tax-exempt organization across the ideological spectrum, depending on which party is in power at a given moment," Caitlin Legacki, a spokesperson for the new coalition, said in a statement. "Presenting a strong and united front against political and ideological censorship is the only way to protect Americans' right to stand up for what they believe in under the First Amendment."
"Any trade union, church, philanthropic, nonprofit media outlet or social welfare organization could become a target if they fall out of favor with the current administration."
The coalition was launched weeks after the U.S. House passed H.R. 9495, with 15 Democrats joining nearly every Republican to push the legislation through the lower chamber.
It appears unlikely that the bill will get a vote in the Senate before the new Congress is sworn in next month, but Republicans could revive the measure once they take control of both chambers and the White House.
On its website, Americans Against Government Censorship warns that "increasingly aggressive activists have been very clear about their intent to use the full force of the federal government to target their enemies and hinder the ability of any opposition to slow or stop their policy agenda—including new efforts to target and weaponize tax status through the IRS."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is among the Republicans pushing the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of a number of nonprofit groups that support Palestinian rights, including Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine.
Americans Against Government Censorship emphasized that the powers included in bills such as H.R. 9495 "could be weaponized by any administration against any tax-exempt organization across the ideological spectrum."
"Any trade union, church, philanthropic, nonprofit media outlet or social welfare organization could become a target if they fall out of favor with the current administration," the coalition said. "At any time, this agenda would allow a sitting president—Democratic or Republican—to use their power to punish ideological opponents without fundamental due process."
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'Flawed and Dangerous': US Appeals Panel Upholds Potential TikTok Ban
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad."
Dec 06, 2024
First Amendment advocates on Friday criticized a U.S. appellate court for upholding a law that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company does not swiftly sell the social media platform used by an estimated 170 million Americans.
Signed by President Joe Biden in April, the law gives ByteDance until January 19 to divest from TikTok. Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the parts of the law considered by the panel "do not contravene the First Amendment" nor other parts of the Constitution of the United States.
"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary's ability to gather data on people in the United States," Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in an opinion the company is expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Responding to the decision on social media Friday, Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said that "the D.C. Circuit's decision today to uphold the TikTok ban is enormously disappointing. If allowed to stand, it would give the government far too much power to restrict Americans' speech online."
Jameel Jaffer, who was on a friend-of-the-court brief as director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, issued a similar warning after the ruling was released.
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad," he said. "I hope the D.C. Circuit's ruling won't be the last word—and I doubt it will be."
Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, also looked ahead to the next court fight.
"The D.C. Circuit decision upholding the TikTok ban will immeasurably harm the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in the U.S. and globally who use the app to create, to share information, to get their news, and promote their businesses," she said in a statement. "We hope the next phase of review of this misguided and overbroad law will be a chance to right this wrong and prevent it from going into effect."
In addition to arguing the law is unconstitutional, attorneys for TikTok and ByteDance "have claimed it's impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically,"
The Associated Pressreported. "They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm—the platform's secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan—would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office one day after the law's divestment deadline, previously supported banning the platform, but during the latest campaign, he pledged to try to "save TikTok." According toThe Washington Post:
Trump is expected to try to halt the TikTok ban, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department, said Trump could take any of three actions to help TikTok fend off the ban: persuading Congress to repeal the law, directing his new attorney general not to enforce it, and declaring that ByteDance has satisfied the statute by performing a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok.
Although the president-elect hasn't yet weighed in on the new court decision, on Thursday he shared on his Truth Social platform a post-election overview of how his campaign performed on TikTok.
While Trump may move to preserve TikTok in the United States, civil rights attorney and Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo noted that the court decision's "terrible precedent" is also a concern as he returns to office.
"This will be a test of the U.S.'s ability to shut down access to websites they dislike," Caraballo stressed. "Really bad to do with Trump in office! We could enter a new era of government censorship."
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