The Justice Department and Tic-Toc faced off in federal court today over a law that would require the app to break ties with its Chinese controlled parent company,

Bight Dance, or be banned in the US.

NPR's Bobby Allen is covering it all and joins us now.

So Bobby, it's good to see you.

So what did the lawyers for Tik-Tok's parent company?

What did they argue in court today?

And what was the case that the US government laid out?

So TikTok's lawyers say this is a free speech violation in two ways.

First, it would violate the free speech of 170 million Americans who use the app that's more than half of the

US population and secondly the lawyers say it would violate the free speech rights of

Tik-Tok itself right we know Tik-Tok is owned by a China-based parent company,

Bight Dance, but it has a US entity in the Los Angeles area, and the lawyers

said, look, that company, too, when it makes curation decisions about what people see on the algorithm

that's a type of free expression. The Justice Department said, hey hang on a

minute here. Tic-Toc is owned by Bike Dance,

and it's not just China, it's a country

that is a foreign adversary.

This is a country who can do espionage on US citizens.

This is a country that might be interested in the data of

Americans and because of that danger it needs to be shut down by

January 19th. So how do we know Bobby that Tik-Tok is a national security threat? So Tik-Tok's lawyers say the

threat that China poses is theoretical that the government has never shown any

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