On Friday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether or not to temporarily block the law requiring TikTok to divest to a US company or face a nationwide ban, marking a final chance for the company to make its case.
TikTok argued during the hearing:
- If Congress was truly concerned about data security, they'd also go after Shein and Temu, companies that also collect plenty of data.
- TikTok attorney Noel Francisco urged the court to block the law without making a determination about whether TikTok could succeed, which would push its enforcement into the domain of President Trump, who promised to save the app.
- “It’s not enough to say national security. You have to say, what is the real harm?”
- The law is a dramatic violation of the Constitution's free speech guarantee.
- “AMC movie theaters used to be owned by a Chinese company. Under this theory, Congress could order AMC movie theaters to censor any movies that Congress doesn't like or promote any movies that Congress wanted.”
- “Everybody manipulates content. There are lots of people who think CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times are manipulating their content. That is core protected speech.”
- It’s not possible to disentangle TikTok US from ByteDance. It would take years to reconstruct a team that could maintain the source code, and it would need to get users around the world to sign up for an essentially new platform to share content.
- See my LinkedIn post demonstrating that last point.
The Department of Justice argued:
- TikTok could be used to build profiles on Americans and be used for “harassment, recruitment, and espionage.” It’s not just collecting info on the 170M Americans on the platform, but also their contacts that users have granted access to.
- “We saw Elon Musk buy Twitter in about six months.” — arguing that the court shouldn't buy the argument that TikTok hasn't been given enough time to sell. (Could they at least have the opportunity to plead their case in court before the clock starts ticking?)
- Foreign-owned newspapers are far different from social media because newspapers collect far less information than social media sites.
- “Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok” — they're just not fine with a foreign adversary gathering all this information on US citizens.
So what now?
Now, we wait for the Supreme Court to announce their decision.
In the meantime though…
- TikTok is promoting its sister app, Lemon8, as an alternative to TikTok via sponsored posts on TikTok featuring the app and highlighting automatic data transfer and follower integration between the two platforms.
- TikTok users are flocking to Xiaohongshu, known as “Rednote” in English — which is a Chinese app that's a cross between Instagram and Pinterest. The app surged to the number-one spot for free apps in the US App Store.