The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to examine whether the impending TikTok ban would violate the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, the Associated Press reported.
The High Court will hear arguments on Jan. 10—just nine days before the federal ban is set to take effect.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit earlier this month upheld the federal ban, affirming that TikTok must divest from its CCP-controlled parent company, ByteDance, by Jan. 19 or the popular social media app will lose access to app stores and web-hosting services in the United States.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
Lawmakers and national security officials have long warned about TikTok’s ties to China, saying the app is a national security threat and subjects the data from its roughly 170 million American users to Chinese surveillance.
TikTok and ByteDance challenged the legislation against it in May, calling the law “an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” based on “speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation” that would suppress the speech of millions of Americans.
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