Within days, TikTok could be banned from being distributed in the United States and, eventually, stop working as an app altogether if the U.S. Supreme Court does not intervene to block a bipartisan law that is set to take effect on Jan. 19.

On Friday, Jan. 10, the justices heard arguments on whether or not to step in and temporarily pause the measure given what TikTok claims is a violation of free speech for its tens of millions of American users.

When Congress passed the law that required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it or see it banned in the U.S., it was partially motivated by the fear that the Chinese government might use TikTok to contort Americans’ discourse, pitting people against one another and eroding their trust in the democratic systems that define American politics.

The Supreme Court on Friday heard oral arguments in a fast-tracked case over the future of TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media app that will be barred from operating in the U.S. in just nine days barring divestiture or eleventh-hour intervention from the high court.

Brussels, meanwhile, retains the progressive faith in managing democratic outcomes by regulating what can and can’t be said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s dismissal of Facebook’s fact-checkers and his replacement of them with a “community notes” approach pioneered by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter) signals the end of an aberrant era in American politics that began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. The era of trying to manage American political outcomes by having social media superintend, rather than facilitate, political debate is over.

Is the tide turning against the censorship-industrial complex? Just weeks after the UK Government confirmed it would no longer fund the Global Disinformation Index, which blacklisted UnHerd, there is fresh evidence that the censorship machine is breaking down.

Inside the silo of the “legacy media,” they are alarmed that left-tilting government bureaucrats are being discouraged from telling social-media platforms what speech they should suppress…in the name of “democracy.”

The U.S. federal government has stopped warning some social networks about foreign disinformation campaigns on their platforms, reversing a years-long approach to preventing Russia and other actors from interfering in American politics less than a year before the U.S. presidential elections, according to company officials.

Tech mogul Elon Musk said Twitter “suppressed” Republicans at a significantly higher rate than Democrats during an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan.

Musk purchased Twitter, which he later renamed X, for $44 billion in October 2022 with the intent of reinstating free speech on the platform and publicly criticized the suppression of the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Conservatives widely praised Musk’s takeover after a series of suspensions and bans of right-leaning figures.