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TikTok will appear before the US Supreme Court on Friday in a last-ditch effort to overturn a ban, in a case testing the limits of national security and free speech.
The popular social media platform is challenging a law passed last year ordering the firm to be split from its Chinese owner or be blocked from the US by 19 January.
The US government is arguing that without a sale, TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.
But TikTok rejects that claim, arguing it has been unfairly targeted and the measure violates the free speech of its some 170 million American users.
Lower courts have sided with the government, but the case was complicated last month when President-elect Donald Trump weighed in on the dispute and asked for the enforcement of the law to be paused to grant him time to work out a deal.
A decision by Supreme Court could be made within days.
Congress passed the law against TikTok last year with support from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
TikTok has repeatedly denied any potential influence by the Chinese Communist Party and has said the law violates the First Amendment free speech rights of its users.
It has asked the Supreme Court to strike down the law as unconstitutional, or order its enforcement to be halted to enable a review of the legislation, which it said was based on “inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information”.
The brief that Trump’s lawyers filed late last month did not take a position on legal dispute, but said the case presented “unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national-security concerns on the other”.
The filing came less than two weeks after Trump met TikTok’s boss at Mar-a-Lago.
One of the president-elect’s major donors, Jeff Yass of Susequehanna International Group, is a big stakeholder in the company.
However, Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of state, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, is in favour of banning the platform.
Investors who have expressed interest in buying the TikTok include Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former LA Dodgers owner Frank McCourt.
Attorney Peter Choharis, who is part of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington, which filed its own brief supporting the US government’s case, said it was hard to predict what the court – which has a conservative majority – would do, noting that several recent court decisions have overturned longstanding precedent.
But he said even if Trump was granted the opportunity to try to work out a deal, he expected a ban eventually.
The prospect of losing TikTok in the US has prompted outcry from many users, some of whom filed their own legal action last year.
In their filing they said the decision that TikTok could be shuttered “because ideas on that platform might persuade Americans of one thing or another – even of something potentially harmful to our democracy – is utterly antithetical to the First Amendment”.
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