While the controversial US law doesn’t necessarily ban TikTok, it does seem designed to make TikTok “go away,” Greene said, and such a move to interfere with a widely used communications platform seems “unprecedented.”
“The TikTok ban itself and the DC Circuit’s approval of it should be of great concern even to those who find TikTok undesirable or scary,” Greene said in a statement. “Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.”
Greene further warned that the US “cutting off a tool used by 170 million Americans to receive information and communicate with the world, without proving with evidence that the tools are presently seriously harmful” would “greatly” lower “well-established standards for restricting freedom of speech in the US.”
TikTok partly appears to be hoping that President-elect Donald Trump will disrupt enforcement of the law, but Greene said it remains unclear if Trump’s plan to “save TikTok” might just be a plan to support a sale to a US buyer. At least one former Trump ally, Steven Mnuchin, has reportedly expressed interest in buying the app.
For TikTok, putting pressure on Trump will likely be the next step, “if the Supreme Court ever says, ‘we agree the law is valid,'” Greene suggested.
“Then that’s it,” Greene said. “There’s no other legal recourse. You only have political recourses.”
Like other civil rights groups, the EFF plans to remain on TikTok’s side as the SCOTUS battle starts.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court will take the case and will urge the justices to apply the appropriately demanding First Amendment scrutiny,” Greene said.
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