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national security
'Completely Out of Touch... Both Parties': Supreme Court Looks Ready to OK TikTok Ban
"Banning TikTok in this way sets a dangerous precedent that could pave the way to future government interventions against online speech," said one advocate.
Jan 10, 2025
To the chagrin of First Amendment defenders and content creators, the Supreme Court on Friday appeared poised to uphold a law passed by Congress last year that would shut down the widely popular social media app TikTok in the U.S. unless its owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, sells it.
The de facto ban on TikTok was tucked into a $95 billion legislative package for aid to Ukraine and Israel that was passed by the Senate in April 2024. A standalone version of the legislation cleared the House with bipartisan support a month earlier. It is set to go into effect on January 19, barring a sale by ByteDance or intervention by the Supreme Court.
The law was justified on national security grounds, which were fueled by fears that national security laws in China could compel ByteDance to give the Chinese government access to data on TikTok users.
Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, wrote Thursday: "The U.S. government stood up to TikTok before they stood up to[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, or the health insurance lobby, or Big Pharma, or Big Oil—no. TikTok. Completely out of touch with the American people. Both parties."
During oral arguments, "justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, [but] the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law," according to Friday reporting from The New York Times.
However, the Times also noted that "several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government's justification for the law: the risk that China might 'covertly' make TikTok manipulate the content shown to Americans or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims."
Ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing on TikTok's appeal of the ban, three bipartisan lawmakers were among the First Amendment advocates who filed amicus briefs in support of the app in late December. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked the court to grant TikTok an emergency injunction to block the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
The ACLU, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and the Freedom of the Press Foundation were among several civil liberties groups that also filed an amicus brief in late December, arguing that the government has not presented sufficient evidence that the app, which is used by 170 million Americans, causes "ongoing or imminent harm."
In a statement released Friday, the Free Press policy counsel Yanni Chen said that "as with repressive laws from oppressive regimes around the world, the real toll of the ban will be on everyday people... TikTok users, many of whom use the platform to organize communities and express views that legacy media often ignore."
"Banning TikTok in this way sets a dangerous precedent that could pave the way to future government interventions against online speech," she added.
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Steelworkers Union Applauds as Biden Blocks Sale of US Steel to Japanese Giant
"We're grateful for President Biden's willingness to take bold action to maintain a strong domestic steel industry and for his lifelong commitment to American workers," said United Steelworkers International President David McCall.
Jan 03, 2025
The United Steelworkers union commended a decision by President Joe Biden, announced Friday, to block a proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel by the Japanese company Nippon Steel.
United Steelworkers International President David McCall said in a statement that the union is "grateful" to Biden for his "willingness to take bold action to maintain a strong domestic steel industry and for his lifelong commitment to American workers."
"We now call on U.S. Steel's board of directors to take the necessary steps to allow it to further flourish and remain profitable," he added.
McCall toldReuters in mid-December that Nippon Steel had not given him an assurance that the Japanese firm is committed to ensuring the lasting success of U.S. Steel. "When we've had discussions with them there's been nothing that would assure us that there's a long-term viability in the operations," McCall said in an interview with the outlet.
In December 2023, U.S. Steel—the Pittsburgh-headquartered company that played a key role in establishing U.S. industrial might—announced that it had entered an agreement to be acquired by Nippon Steel for $14.9 billion. The deal drew scrutiny from lawmakers, federal regulators, and the United Steelworkers union, causing its closing to be delayed. Biden, who has made reviving "American-style" industrial policy a key part of his presidency, has long indicated his opposition to the deal.
Biden said he ultimately decided to block the proposed acquisition because he believes that "a strong domestically owned and operated steel industry represents an essential national security priority and is critical for resilient supply chains."
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal committee that has the power to review certain transactions involving foreign investment in the United States to evaluate a deal's impact on national security, decided to forgo making a formal recommendation about whether the deal should be allowed to proceed last week.
The proposal also became ensnared in election year politics, with both presidential candidates saying that U.S. Steel should remain a domestically-owned firm. Rust Belt lawmakers in both parties, including Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)—both of whom lost re-election in November—and Vice President-elect JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, expressed opposition to the deal.
Shortly after the deal was unveiled, multiple Pennsylvania Democrats, including Casey and Rep. Summer Lee, wrote to the president of Nippon Steel expressing concerns about the failure of the two firms to consult or notify the United Steelworkers union ahead of the announcement, according to Reuters.
"From the beginning, the workers who power this company should have had a seat at the negotiating table—their livelihoods hung in the balance. No matter what, I will keep fighting to protect Western PA Steelworker jobs and American steelmaking," wrote Representative Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) on Friday.
U.S. Steel, for its part, has attempted to refute criticisms of the deal. David B. Burritt, the president and chief executive of U.S. Steel, penned an op-ed in The New York Times in December, arguing that blocking the deal would help China. "With this deal, our workers' jobs would be more secure, our customers would be better served and China's domination of global steel production would be weakened. Without it, we would become more vulnerable," he wrote.
"Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel are confident that our transaction would revitalize communities that rely on American steel," the two firms said in a joint statement Friday. They condemned Biden's decision as "unlawful" and said that the president's "statement and order do not present any credible evidence of a national security issue, making clear that this was a political decision."
"Following President Biden's decision, we are left with no choice but to take all appropriate action to protect our legal rights," they wrote.
This article was updated to include a statement from Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel.
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A Court Upheld the TikTok Ban, Proving Trump’s Not the Only Threat to Press Freedom
Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power.
Dec 11, 2024
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).
But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A U.S. District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.
Censorship for Freedom
Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, 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” (Reuters, 12/6/24).
In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”
Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:
The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”
He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”
Two-Fifths of the Nation
But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black, and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”
An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.
This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State (Intercept, 11/21/24).
With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media… pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.
For example, The New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.
In order to advance Beijing’s “goal… to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.
But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica, and The Intercept.
Flimsy Security Concerns
Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.
And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off U.S. airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.
The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok
accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S.
To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.”
But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.
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