TikToks fate divides Trump and fellow Republicans as Supreme Court action looms

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...