With the country’s TikTok ban imminent, one Kentucky legislator is lauding its likely closure.
Just ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling — one denying TikTok an injunction against enforcement of the Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024 — U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) submitted an amicus brief, urging the Court to allow the ban-or-divest law to take effect.
On First Amendment merits, McConnell said the court’s decision is “entirely consistent with the First Amendment,” and that the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment “does not apply to a corporate agent of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Furthermore, McConnell noted that the core of the right to free speech is the principle that “speech cannot be regulated by the government,” but with force, it does apply to a “maligned foreign government like Communist China,” which he said is essentially demanding the ability to regulate speech on its TikTok platform.
He called the topsy-turvy idea that TikTok has an expressive right to facilitate the CCP censorship regime “absurd” and posited: “Would Congress have needed to allow Nikita Khrushchev to buy CBS and replace The Bing Crosby Show with Alexander Nevsky?”
In regard to TikTok’s dilatory appeal, McConnell said any such injunction “would move the divesture date beyond that prescribed by law—and into a new presidential administration.” He also noted that TikTok clearly “hopes that the next administration will be more sympathetic to its plight than the incumbent administration.”
According to the Associated Press, outgoing President Joe Biden has affirmed he will not enforce the ban before he leaves office, and incoming President Donald Trump has pledged to save the popular application — one that some in the U.S. have called “a threat.”
