Dem
47
GOP
53
On April 24, 2024, Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. on Jan. 19, 2025 unless its U.S. operations were sold to an American company. This is because the owner of TikTok, a company called ByteDance, works very closely with the Chinese government. Gigabytes of data about 170 million Americans are being stored in databases operated by the Chinese government. The possibilities for blackmail and more are legion. The purpose of the law was to put the company in American hands and not feed a vast amount of data about Americans to China. Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart have expressed interest in possibly buying the U.S. part of TikTok, but ByteDance has not shown any interest in selling it.
When the law passed, ByteDance and others sued to get it overturned. The law survived at the district court level. On Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. sustained the district court decision unanimously, saying that national security interests and the government's legitimate interest in blocking a hostile foreign government from collecting a treasure trove of information about Americans outweighed the First Amendment. After all, there are plenty of other places people can post and view videos. Needless to say, the case will soon be dumped in John Roberts' lap. While conservatives dominate the Supreme Court, it is not clear what the conservative position is here. The ACLU is against the law because it limits some people's expression, so that could give the Court an idea of which side it should be on (hint: oppose ACLU).
A key issue is where is Donald Trump on this issue. During Trump v1.0, the president was in favor of forcing ByteDance to sell its American operations to some American company. But during his campaign this year, he used TikTok extensively to reach hard-to-reach voters. Of course, if the U.S. operations were sold to some big American company, nothing would have to change except that data on Americans wouldn't be handed to the Chinese government. If he wanted to, he could drop the lawsuit. On the other hand, pressure from Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart could make him change his mind.
Technically, the law bans Apple and Google from making the app available in their stores after Jan. 19. Trump could announce that the new AG will not take action to enforce the law. However, we doubt that Apple and Google's lawyers would take the risk of knowingly breaking the law just because Trump said he wouldn't enforce it. After all, he could change his mind at any time. In any event, the future of the app is up in the air for the moment. (V)