TikTok owner has strong First Amendment case against US ban, professors say

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

TikTok owner ByteDance is preparing to sue the US government now that President Biden has signed into law a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell the company within 270 days. While it’s impossible to predict the outcome with certainty, law professors speaking to Ars believe that ByteDance will have a strong First Amendment case in its lawsuit against the US.

One reason for this belief is that just a few months ago, a US District Court judge blocked a Montana state law that attempted to ban TikTok. In October 2020, another federal judge in Pennsylvania blocked a Trump administration order that would have banned TikTok from operating inside the US. TikTok also won a preliminary injunction against Trump in US District Court for the District of Columbia in September 2020.

“Courts have said that a TikTok ban is a First Amendment problem,” Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who writes frequent analysis of legal cases involving technology, told Ars this week. “And Congress didn’t really try to navigate away from that. They just went ahead and disregarded the court rulings to date.”