This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 18th,

2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A federal divest or ban law with respect to the app Tic Talk over potential risks associated

with its alleged ties to China's government got a hearing in federal court this week with

respect to impacts on two groups, owners of the app and

creators on the app.

Cato's Jennifer Huddleston and Tommy Berry parse the arguments presented.

There was a lot of discussion about how to properly characterize this law, even internally here, because

it's not a straight ahead ban.

And for owners of Tik-Toc, the choice was created with this law.

You either divest yourself from ownership of this company, or it effectively is banned in the United States.

What was the question?

How was that question presented to the court, Jen?

Caleb, as you mentioned, this is in some ways a more nuanced proposal than just a flat out the government

decided to ban the app and that was certainly present in some of the

courts questions as I'm sure Tommy and I will discuss later in this episode.

What was really before the court today were two cases involving a challenge to the underlying constitutionality of the divester ban requirement as it relates to First Amendment rights.

So you have one case brought by TikTok US, the US company that feels its rights are being challenged by TikTok being expressly named in this proposal, in addition to the fact that the proposal allows for other companies to potentially go through a procedure and be subject to it as well, as well as a group of Tik-Toc creators who feel that their speech rights as American users of this

platform or even as American consumers of content on this platform would potentially be implicated by this law in which the government

could be prohibiting their ability to speak or to use their platform of choice.

These cases were separate.

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