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Arguments set for 10 days before Trump takes office

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Republican attorneys general from 22 states back the law

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TikTok calls impending ban a free speech violation

By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - While President-elect

Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to block a looming U.S.

ban on TikTok in a major case being argued on Friday that pits

free speech rights against national security concerns over the

Chinese-owned short-video app, many of his Republican allies

have urged the opposite.

These diverging views raise the stakes for the court, which

has a 6-3 conservative majority, as it prepares to decide the

fate of a popular social media platform used by about half of

Americans in a case testing the U.S. Constitution's First

Amendment protections against government abridgment of speech.

"This is the most significant free speech case in at least a

generation," said Timothy Edgar, a former U.S. national security

and intelligence official who has worked in both Republican and

Democratic presidential administrations.

"If we consider that there are 170 million active monthly

users of TikTok in the United States, the volume of free speech

at risk is the largest of any Supreme Court case in American

history," added Edgar, who now teaches cybersecurity at Brown

University and joined a brief backing TikTok in the case.

Driven by concerns that China could access data or spy on

Americans with the app, Congress overwhelmingly passed the

measure last year with bipartisan support, and Democratic

President Joe Biden signed it into law. It requires TikTok's

China-based parent company ByteDance to sell the platform or

face a U.S. ban on Jan. 19.

The dispute goes before the top U.S. judicial body at a time

of growing trade tensions between the world's two biggest

economies and just 10 days before Trump is due to begin his

second term as president.

The Justice Department, defending the law, has said TikTok

poses a threat to U.S. national security because of its access

to immense amounts of data on American users, from locations to

private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate content

that they view on the app.

TikTok and ByteDance rebut the national security claims,

instead portraying the law as running afoul of the First

Amendment. If the law is allowed to stand "then Congress will

have free rein to ban any American from speaking simply by

identifying some risk that the speech is influenced by a foreign

entity," they told the Supreme Court in a filing.

Trump has said he has a "warm spot" for TikTok and has vowed

to "save" a platform on which his campaign generated "billions

of views."

"President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at

this juncture, and seeks the ability to resolve the issues at

hand through political means once he takes office," Trump's

lawyer John Sauer wrote in a filing, asking the justices to put

the law on hold.

Sauer is Trump's pick to serve as U.S. solicitor general,

the government's chief lawyer at the Supreme Court.

STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL WEIGH IN

By contrast, many Republican lawmakers and officials are

pressing the court - whose conservative majority includes three

justices appointed by Trump during his first term as president -

to back the Biden administration in its defense of the measure.

Republican attorneys general from 22 states filed a brief

with the court disagreeing with TikTok's arguments and asking

the justices to uphold the statute.

"Allowing TikTok to operate in the United States without

severing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposes

Americans to the risk of the Chinese Communist Party accessing

and exploiting their data," these state officials, led by

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, wrote in their filing.

Montana tried to ban TikTok at the state level but was blocked

by a federal court.

Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has compared

TikTok's litigation to a hardened criminal seeking a "stay of

execution." The Republican chairman and the top Democratic

member of a U.S. House of Representatives panel focused on China

issues urged the justices to uphold the measure to "protect the

American people from foreign threats."

Biden's administration on Jan. 3 asked the justices to reject

Trump's request to put the ban on hold.

Trump's support for TikTok is a reversal from 2020, when during

his first term as president he tried to block the app and force

its sale to American companies. Trump has since said a TikTok

ban would benefit Meta-owned platforms Facebook and

Instagram, which he has criticized for suspending him after the

attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

TikTok, ByteDance and some users who post content on the app

appealed a Dec. 6 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the

District of Columbia Circuit upholding the law.

If the Supreme Court upholds the statute, Edgar said, "the

stakes for internet freedom both in the United States and around

the world are high."

The U.S. government, Edgar added, "will be on solid ground

if it chooses to regulate or ban any digital platform with

substantial involvement from foreign investors." Another widely

used platform, Telegram, "may be next," Edgar added.

In a Dec. 13 letter, U.S. lawmakers told Apple ( AAPL ) and

Alphabet's Google, which operate the two main mobile

app stores, that they must be ready to remove TikTok from those

stores on Jan. 19.

While U.S. users probably will still be able to use TikTok after

the deadline because it is already downloaded on their phones,

according to experts, over time the app will become unusable

without software and security updates.