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TikTok defends itself in federal court against Congress’s attempt to block the service

Posted on by darion

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard TikTok’s defense on Monday.as the social media company tried to convince a three-judge panel that Congress’s attempts to ban the platform violated the First Amendment.

It’s unclear whether the justices were convinced. Justice Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, and Justice Douglas Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, both seemed skeptical of TikTok’s argument that Congress lacked the authority to force the sale of the app to a U.S. company.

“I know Congress doesn’t pass laws all the time, but they did it here,” Rao said. “They basically passed a law. And a lot of your arguments want us to treat them like an agency.”

The federal government’s first attempts to ban TikTok came under the Trump administration. In August 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a U.S.-based company. President Joe Biden rescinded the executive order but directed his administration to investigate whether concerns about Chinese abuses of the platform were justified.

Then, in March 2024, Congress passed a bill to force the sale again, and Biden signed it. Trump has since changed his mind about TikTok, now arguing — with some truth — that banning TikTok would reduce competition and increase Meta’s dominance.

But if TikTok doesn’t win in court, the app will be blocked until the end of the year unless it finds a buyer in the U.S. Otherwise, the iPhone app store will be forced to stop updating and, ultimately, making the app available. This is a real First Amendment question: Can the U.S. government ban Americans from creating, viewing, and engaging in speech on the platform?

“TikTok speech is not Chinese speech,” TikTok’s attorney, Jeffrey Fisher, said during Monday’s hearing. “It’s American speech.”

American actors who claim TikTok poses a national security threat have generally not explained exactly what they mean, although it is certainly possible that the Chinese government — a repressive, authoritarian regime — is using its influence over the company to promote propaganda or anti-American speech. That’s wrong, but censoring propaganda is not the answer; let people watch it if they want.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called the TikTok ban “a disturbing gift of unprecedented power to President Biden and the surveillance state that threatens the very fabric of American digital innovation and free speech.” He’s absolutely right. The federal government can’t be trusted with the authority to police social media platforms. We already know what federal bureaucrats will do with such power: use it to censor contradictory and provocative speech.

Regardless of what the Court of Appeal decides, the case will likely go to the Supreme Court.

The second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump inspired some truly awful claims. Rachel Vindman, the wife of Trump impeachment witness Alexander Vindman, wrote on X: “No ears were damaged. Go on with your Sunday afternoon.” She later deleted the comment.

Former Republican congressman and current critical CNN commentator Adam Kinzinger appeared to suggest that Trump himself was to blame for the attempted coup because of his aggressive rhetoric.

Trump, for his part, wasted no time in blaming his political enemies, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, for the thwarted attack.

“Their rhetoric is causing them to shoot me when I’m supposed to be saving the country and they’re destroying it — from the inside and the outside,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle love to blame violent rhetoric for real-world violence. For years, Democrats wrongly attributed the horrific shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) to conservative rhetoric. Now, the opposite is true, with Trump and his supporters embracing an argument they rightly found laughable a few news cycles ago.

When crazy lunatics commit violent acts, blame those who are actually responsible (crazy lunatics) –NO other people’s speech.

The two worst headlines in response to the attempted attack came from Cincinnati Enquirer AND TIME warehouse. Opinion article in Inquirer stated that “there is no place for violence in politics. That said, former President Donald Trump brings a lot of these things upon himself.”

Meanwhile, TIME wrote that the alleged shooter — Ryan Wesley Routh — had a “vague political ideology.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Routh has been outspoken on social media, and has been questioned by mainstream media outlets — including New York Times AND Semaphore—and self-published a book. He is very clearly a former Republican who now hates Trump, is fanatically pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia, and is a staunch supporter of Biden and Harris. That’s not to say that Democratic anti-Trump rhetoric is to blame for the shooting, but no one should pretend that his ideology is some giant secret. It isn’t.

Scenes from Washington, DC

Washington City Council member Trayon White, who once claimed the Rothschilds were responsible for a massive snowstorm in the city, has been arrested on bribery charges.

  • Police arrested Sean Combs on sex trafficking charges.
  • Richard Nixon, the father of the war on drugs, apparently said privately that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”
  • Future Trump assassin Ryan Routh hid in the bushes for almost 12 hours before the Secret Service stopped him.
  • Don’t expect to find out who won Pennsylvania on election night.
  • Republicans are frustrated with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).