Attorney Alan Dershowitz appeared on Newsmax Friday to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to uphold the TikTok ban, calling it “a B-minus” effort that “looks like a first draft written by a law clerk.”
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the decision that will ban TikTok in the United States for national security reasons unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it. During an appearance on “The Record with Greta Van Susteren,” Dershowitz said he defended Tiktok’s right to operate and criticized the ban for blocking access to millions of users.
“It [the Supreme Court’s decision] was rushed through. It goes through all the standards that you have to apply, and it got it all wrong,” Dershowitz said. “I don’t like TikTok. I wish it were defeated in the marketplace of ideas. But the idea of preventing 170 million people from having access to it on speculative assumptions about national security, this is not going to have one bit of a positive impact on protecting America’s national security.”
Dershowitz said he believes the unanimous decision reflects a broader issue within the Supreme Court.
“The reason why the Supreme Court ruled this way, nine-nothing, is there is not a single civil libertarian on the United States Supreme Court. There are leftists, and there are conservatives. The closest you should come to it probably is Gorsuch,” Dershowitz said. “Scalia was a civil libertarian. But there are no real civil libertarians today on the Supreme Court. There are no real civil libertarians on the American Civil Liberties Union. There are no real civil libertarians in many American universities.”
Dershowitz cited certain past Supreme Court justices and said they were true civil libertarians who advocated for free speech.
“Over the days of Hugo Black and William Douglas and Arthur Goldberg and real civil libertarians who saw the virtue and value of freedom of speech, not this court. That’s why they were nine-nothing and denying free speech claims,” Dershowitz said.
TikTok has consistently refuted allegations that it’s connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, a former senior employee at ByteDance said that CCP members within the company possess “superuser” capabilities and a “backdoor channel” that allows them to access American users’ data.
Additionally, a study conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University suggests that TikTok frequently features content that aligns with the CCP’s agenda. The platform has faced accusations of collecting data on Americans’ political preferences and unlawfully gathering information on children.
In response, TikTok initiated a lawsuit to prevent the enforcement of a law that would either compel its divestiture or ban its operations. Furthermore, officials from the Chinese embassy actively opposed this legislation, lobbying against it on Capitol Hill during its legislative journey last spring.
In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that mandates that the Chinese-owned social media platform sell to a non-Chinese entity within a year or face a ban. A trio of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered a unanimous decision on Dec. 6, affirming the ban as they identified TikTok as a likely national security threat, highlighting the Chinese government’s ties to the application.
President-elect Donald Trump said he would address the matter “through political means once he takes office.” Although Trump previously tried to prohibit the app through executive orders, Trump reversed his position and openly criticized legislation against TikTok. He argued that banning the social media platform might inadvertently favor Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.
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