TikTok plea live: Supreme Court hears arguments with TikTok ban looming

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

Just as the former solicitor general Noel Francisco, appearing
for TikTok and ByteDance, sought to drive home their argument that the
sale-or-ban law would burden the platform’s speech – current Solicitor General
Elizabeth B Prelogar repeatedly returned to the government’s view that the
Chinese state could, at some point, try to access sensitive US user data via
the companies.

She stressed that TikTok collects more data than other platforms
on an “unprecedented” scale – a claim the company has denied – and warned it
represented risks of espionage and blackmail.

But some justices seemed almost bored with some elements of this
arguments. Justice Kagan said that TikTok’s Chinese ownership was well-known,
rather than something allowing the platform to be left open to “covert”
manipulation.

She added that surely every social platform had its own “black
box” algorithm of sorts.

Protecting against risks that have not yet materialised was
described by Justice Gorsuch as “a pretty paternalistic point of view”.
Though not all were so sceptical.

Justice Roberts joked that if, as Prelogar suggested, ByteDance
may be trying to get Americans to argue with each other via TikTok – it had
already won.

Leaving things on a less certain note was her response to a
question about the looming deadline for TikTok’s ban, and whether
President-elect Trump could delay it.
Francisco had said that if the law is upheld, the platform would “go dark”
on its 19 January deadline day – but Prelogar suggested there was still time
for a sale or change to the way TikTok operates.