Report from Platform Economy Insights
In Brief – The US Supreme Court decisively ruled against the First Amendment challenges of TikTok and a group of content creators against the federal law that requires the business to be sold by China-based ByteDance to a new owner not based in an “adversarial country”. The 27-page decision, available here, was per curium, meaning the justices did not release any vote or the opinion’s author.
The court determined that First Amendment “intermediate scrutiny” was the appropriate level of review, and found that the law comprehensively met that standard. “As applied to petitioners, the Act satisfies intermediate scrutiny. The challenged provisions further an important Government interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression and do not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further that interest.”
The justices, who described their ruling as “narrowly focused” due to the “expedited time allowed” for their review, paid particular attention to the massive data collection by TikTok due to the number of users and type of data collected, the congressional concern with the security implications of that data in light of the linkages between ByteDance, its TikTok business, and the “adversarial” government of China, and the fact that the law requires divestiture, not shutting down of the platform.
It has been reported that TikTok planned to shut down the service on Sunday if they lost in the Supreme Court, that the outgoing Biden Administration would not take action implementing or delaying the law and leave it to the new administration, and that the President-elect Trump will attempt to “to save” TikTok.