TikTok’s Lawyer Tells Supreme Court App Could ‘Go Dark’ Next Week While Asking Very Skeptical Justices to Intervene

An attorney for TikTok told the Supreme Court Friday the app could “go dark” next week while asking skeptical justices to issue an injunction preventing a law banning the platform in the US from going into effect.

NBC News reported that company lawyer Noel Francisco told justices Friday that TikTok had First Amendment protections, an argument that both conservative and liberal justices appeared skeptical of.

Last April, President Joe Biden agreed with Congress that TikTok posed a potential national security threat.  The popular app is owned by Beijing’s ByteDance. Biden signed a law into effect that offered ByteDance until next week to divest from TikTok or see it removed from US app stores. The company declined to do so.

C-SPAN shared an argument Francsico made to Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh while implying President-elect Donald Trump could throw the app a lifeline once he takes office on Jan. 20.

Trump filed his own motion last month that sought to temporarily halt the ban on TikTok. During his first term, Trump railed against TikTok as a security risk but after the 2024 election, he touted his popularity on the app. Billioniare Jeff Yass, one of Trump’s top campaign donors, is also one of TikTok’s largest U.S. investors. Trump had notably signaled a shift on TikTok long before joining the app during the campaign.

“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,’” Trump said in Arizona last month.

The ban on the app is slated to go into effect on Jan. 19, NBC News reported. Francisco said a TikTok ban would violate Constitutional rights Friday as jurists questioned the basis of his argument:

While justices expressed some concerns about the law raising free speech issues, especially as it relates to the platform’s content moderation policies, they also appeared willing to defer at least to some of the government’s national security justifications related to concerns about collection of data of American users.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the government’s arguments about data collection were “very strong,” but that the concerns about the Chinese government exerting control over content “raise much more challenging questions.”

Chief Justice John Roberts also seemed reluctant to second-guess Congress, citing its findings that ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws that require it to assist with intelligence gathering.

“So are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” he asked.

Among other questions posed by justices were whether TikTok’s free speech rights are even at issue given that the law targets its foreign owner, which may not be able to claim First Amendment protections.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan asked Francisco, “The only First Amendment rights lie in Tiktok, which does have First Amendment rights. And I guess my question is, how are those First Amendment rights really being implicated here?”

NBC News reported Francisco also stated TikTok could cease to work in the US next week during an exchange with Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The network concluded the court’s justices were leaning “toward upholding the law that could ban TikTok.”

Watch above via C-SPAN.