Ahead of Supreme Court arguments over the future of TikTok, critics have warned that banning the popular social media app in the United States would be an assault on free speech. For some Republican lawmakers, that’s at least part of the point — and there’s a very specific type of speech they want to squash: pro-Palestinian sentiments.

Republicans have been discussing banning TikTok since Donald Trump’s first term, with a plethora of justifications centered around Chinese interference. But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content. TikTok, for its part, has vigorously defended itself against the perception that it favors Palestinian perspectives and asserted that its algorithm does not “take sides.”

Nina Smith, a political communications strategist and former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams, said the GOP’s messaging around TikTok and Palestine is emblematic of the party’s double standards on free speech. “They’re pushing for their ability to say all manner of things on the internet. And yet they want to try and censor people who are very concerned about, justifiably concerned about what’s going on in the Middle East,” Smith said. “And so it’s absolutely a freedom of speech violation.”

The de facto ban on TikTok was tucked into a $95 billion legislative package for aid to Ukraine and Israel that Congress passed in April. The legislation required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance — which is based in Beijing, China, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands — to either sell to an American company or face a nationwide ban. TikTok countered that the law did not provide the company with enough time to find a suitable buyer and........

© The Intercept