The Chinese government has kidnapped the children of Jeff Bezos, forcing the owner of The Washington Post to print its propaganda. Congress orders him to shut down the storied newspaper, whose humble motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Is that constitutional?
The Supreme Court considered such eccentric hypotheticals Friday as it evaluates the pending U.S. ban on social media app TikTok absent its “qualified divestiture” by China-based ByteDance, with only nine days to rule before the bipartisan law signed by President Biden takes effect and the wildcard of pending Trump administration China policy starting the next day.
The law lets the president determine whether an owner subject to a “foreign adversary” has control over or an operational relationship with a U.S. entity, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which fears it could hit “news websites that offer even rudimentary user-comment functionality” and calls its adversary list “somewhat arbitrary.”
A study awaiting peer review concludes TikTok likely manipulates its algorithm to suppress anti-China content and influence user opinion on that government’s human rights record, which TikTok dismissed as “[c]reating fake accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner” to create a “false, predetermined conclusion.”