TikTok and a coterie of its users came before the Supreme Court on Friday to mount their last-resort First-Amendment challenge to the law that will force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the platform or cease its U.S. operations in less than two weeks on Jan. 19.
For 2 1/2 hours, lawyers led the court in circles around the two core points of contention: first, whether the divestiture law impermissibly burdened protected speech; and second, whether Congress’s concerns over data harvesting by the Chinese Communist Party presented an independent and constitutionally sufficient basis for upholding the law.
The argument featured one current and one former U.S. solicitor general, one Silicon Valley law partner play acting a civil libertarian, and nine justices most of whom sounded unsure of how best to approach the problem before them.
Congress…
