His name is a mouthful, but no one pauses to read the text of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that Congress and the President passed Joe Biden Codified as law last year, there may be doubts that its purpose was to give TikTok and its foreign owners an ultimatum: sell the hugely popular app to a US-based company or suspend operations in the country by a certain date to set. Can the government do this? That the date happens to be the last full day of the sitting president’s term is icing on the cake – as if the political branches had decided that the stakes were too high to keep the US version of TikTok under Chinese government control the whims of the electorate.

This legislative decision was prescient. Because now this Donald Trump is the president-elect, and the new Congress has made it clear that he cannot have “one big, beautiful bill” to fund his tax cuts And Expanding the deportation machinery he would like to set in motion, there is simply no telling how the new commander in chief will deal with the bipartisan consensus that TikTok’s days are numbered – unless and until the People’s Republic of China gives in to a suitable bidder . That won’t happen: China is reportedly all but committed to a U.S. shutdown if all else fails.

The so-called TikTok ban, which goes into effect in 10 days, is now in the hands of the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which has its own history of moving in whichever direction the wind blows. Just before the holidays, justices agreed to expedite a final attempt by TikTok and Chinese-controlled tech giant ByteDance and a group of content creators to freeze the divestment or banishment law. Their main and only argument is that the First Amendment prevents the US government from shutting down a platform that some 170 million users rely on for the distribution and consumption of news, entertainment, culture and much more. Congress should not pass a law restricting the sharing of these things, they say.

Or can it? The past, present and future attorneys general of the United States — the title given to the government’s top lawyer on the Supreme Court — all have different ideas about the issue and how the case should play out. In turn, TikTok and ByteDance reached out Noel Francisco, Trump’s former attorney general and a key proponent of everything from his anti-Muslim travel ban to failed attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act and protections for Dreamers. In Francisco and his team’s view, Congress is “silencing a speech platform used by half the country,” and therefore its ban must be subjected to the highest form of judicial scrutiny – the kind that almost no government action can survive .

To make this case, the company is more or less arguing that it should be treated like an American publisher making editorial decisions – and that its powerful algorithm, which determines which dance videos or TikTok challenges appear in a user’s feed, This is comparable to a newspaper deciding on the articles that are presented to readers. “If the Washington Post “If the company uses an algorithm to email its subscribers comments based solely on predicted subscriber preferences, that would be an editorial decision – a decision to target readers with content they are likely to want, rather than what they are likely to want “What the editors think they should read,” writes Francisco succinctly in a legal article. “The First Amendment fully protects such editorial decisions.”

TikTok must really like this post Analogy, if not the paper’s place in national discourse, for later in the same letter Francisco posits a hypothesis that Congress is trying to establish Jeff Bezos Sell ​​the newspaper because lawmakers fear the extent of his transnational business ties could lead to foreign adversaries pressuring him to steer journalism in a way favorable to them. “This law would obviously burden his First Amendment rights,” Francisco added.

The current Attorney General, Elizabeth Prelogar, Anyone who will be out of work until noon on Inauguration Day will have one last chance to make a mark on where the power lies. Her letter, like others from her time in office, presents a maximalist view of Congress and the president’s prerogative to protect national security. And an order to divest has nothing to do with the First Amendment in this area. “Congress and the Executive Branch concluded that ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable threat to national security,” she writes, “because this relationship could enable a foreign adversary government to obtain information about the TikTok “To collect and manipulate content received by American users from TikTok,” even if such damage had not yet occurred.”

The administration’s two justifications for the legislation — the risk of data exploitation and espionage by a foreign adversary and the possible manipulation of content in a way that could influence U.S. users — are not just academic. That TikTok is not allowed in China, This of all things is strong evidence that ByteDance is aware of the app’s power to persuade people with content that only ByteDance’s closely guarded algorithm knows how to curate. That means ByteDance demands freedom of expression here, but not at home. (The company operates a TikTok-like alternative, Douyin, in China.) As the U.S. welcomes a new presidential administration that is already ushering in a new world order, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which China turns to TikTok for protection supports its interests at home and abroad.