{"id":143209,"date":"2025-01-10T20:15:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T20:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/10\/tiktok-still-seems-headed-for-a-ban-after-its-supreme-court-arguments\/"},"modified":"2025-01-10T20:15:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T20:15:47","slug":"tiktok-still-seems-headed-for-a-ban-after-its-supreme-court-arguments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/10\/tiktok-still-seems-headed-for-a-ban-after-its-supreme-court-arguments\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok still seems headed for a ban after its Supreme Court arguments"},"content":{"rendered":"


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After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments<\/a> over a law that could ban TikTok, it looks like one of its last possible lifelines is unlikely to save it from the impending ouster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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TikTok will be banned from the US unless either the Supreme Court blocks the law from taking effect before the January 19th deadline or its China-based parent company, ByteDance, finally agrees to sell it. A sale \u2014 and return \u2014 of TikTok could happen after the deadline, and President-elect Donald Trump may get creative in trying not to enforce the law once he\u2019s sworn in the next day. But the longer it takes, the shakier things look for TikTok.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bloomberg Intelligence senior litigation analyst Matthew Schettenhelm gave TikTok a 30 percent chance of winning at the Supreme Court before oral arguments, but he lowered that prediction to just 20 percent after hearing the justices\u2019 questioning. TikTok made a last-ditch plea for the court to issue an administrative stay without signaling a ruling on the law\u2019s merits, something Trump has suggested so he can attempt to broker a TikTok sale. Schettenhelm says that\u2019s unlikely \u2014 the court does not tend to issue that kind of pause just because of a change in administration, he adds, and it\u2019s unlikely to want to set that precedent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A short order on the case could come as soon as Friday afternoon, after the justices are scheduled to meet. The court is also scheduled to release orders on Monday morning, though Schettenhelm warns not to read into it if nothing is released by then \u2014 it may just mean they\u2019re fleshing out their reasoning in a longer written order.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump has said he\u2019d like to save the app, and in theory, he could declare he won\u2019t enforce the divest-or-ban law. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that even if he chooses not to enforce the law, that may not provide sufficient protection for companies like Apple and Google \u2014\u00a0which could be fined $5,000 per user that accesses TikTok if they maintain it in their app stores. US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the statute of limitations is five years; those companies would still be violating the law as long as it remains on the books, and they could face penalties even after Trump leaves office, should the next administration choose to enforce it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u00a0think those companies would be undertaking enormous risk to not comply with the law on the hope that President Trump doesn\u2019t enforce it against them,\u201d Schettenhelm says. \u201cYou get into the hundreds of billions of dollars of potential liability. And even if President Trump is saying, \u2018don\u2019t worry about it, I\u2019m not going to enforce it against you,\u2019 do you really want to take the chance that he\u2019s not going to change his mind on that? Do you really want to give him that level of leverage over your company? I doubt it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t see another social media company that is similarly situated to TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Schettenhelm doesn\u2019t believe a ruling against TikTok would create a precedent that threatens US-based social media companies. \u201cI don\u2019t see another social media company that is similarly situated to TikTok,\u201d he says, pointing out that the arguments largely centered around ownership. Foreign-owned e-commerce companies like Shein and Temu that came up might be another story. But, he says, \u201cnone of that really jumped out as an imminent risk just because of this argument.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By contrast, Cornell University law professor and First Amendment expert Gautam Hans agrees the justices are unlikely to strike down the law, but he worries that such a ruling could have broader implications for other companies. During arguments, the justices and attorneys for TikTok and its users discussed hypotheticals about whether allowing a ban on certain types of corporate structure (like ownership by a Chinese parent company) would allow for backdoor speech regulations \u2014 including demanding a company\u2019s owner sell it off to punish it for protected speech. But these concerns didn\u2019t appear to be deal-breakers for the court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat remains unfortunate is the credulity with which many of the justices treated this law, which clearly implicates free speech rights on underspecified national security grounds,\u201d Hans said in a statement. \u201cI don\u2019t think the distinction on foreign and domestic ownership is sufficiently stable to allay my concerns that a ruling upholding the TikTok ban creates a very slippery slope.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a law that could ban TikTok, it looks like one of its last possible lifelines is unlikely to save it from the impending ouster. TikTok will be banned from the US unless either the Supreme Court blocks the law from taking effect before the January 19th deadline […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":143210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-143209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}