It could be a trial for the ages. TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has taken the US state to court over a law that requires the social network to be sold to a US entity by 19 January – although a three-month extension is possible under certain circumstances – or else become unavailable in the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The basis for TikTok’s lawsuit was more than predictable: the company considers the ban to be an unprecedented attack on freedom of speech in the United States, which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution. This is a new edition of the old free speech vs. security debate, as TikTok is considered a danger to US national security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The law is unprecedented in US history in its determination to ban a single company. When the US has banned other publications – as it did several Nazi magazines in the 1940s and eight communist publications in the so-called \u2018Red Scare\u2019 era of the 1950s – it has always done so in groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n