{"id":768,"date":"2025-01-17T15:50:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T16:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/?p=768"},"modified":"2025-02-20T15:01:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T15:01:16","slug":"the-supreme-courts-decision-upholding-the-tiktok-ban-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/17\/the-supreme-courts-decision-upholding-the-tiktok-ban-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s decision upholding the TikTok ban, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Demonstrator

Sarah Baus of Charleston, South Carolina, holds a sign that reads \u201cKeep TikTok,\u201d as she and other content creators stand outside the Supreme Court. | Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law that effectively bans<\/a> the social media app TikTok in the United States, unless the platform\u2019s China-based owner sells TikTok. Though Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch disagreed somewhat with the unsigned majority opinion\u2019s rationale, no justice dissented.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that all three of the lower court judges who heard this case, known as TikTok v. Garland<\/em><\/a>, agreed that the law should be upheld. That means that no judge has determined that the law is unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

Despite that, it\u2019s uncertain what the decision means longterm for TikTok and its users. Congress passed a law banning the app that the Supreme Court has now upheld, but it\u2019s not clear whether the government will actually enforce it, which prohibits US companies \u2014 including Apple and Google<\/a>, which make the TikTok app available on their app stores \u2014 from providing services to TikTok.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The law takes effect on Sunday, one day before President Joe Biden leaves office. Biden has said that he will not enforce the ban<\/a> in his final day as president, and it would be unrealistic anyway to expect the federal government to bring an enforcement proceeding to completion in a single day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made vague noises suggesting that he may not enforce the ban, but it\u2019s unclear how he intends to proceed with TikTok after he takes office on Monday. Trump filed a brief<\/a> in the Supreme Court claiming that he \u201calone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, the law will now take effect on Sunday, and the statute of limitations for the government to enforce the law is five years<\/a>. So US companies that decide not to comply with the law \u2014 even if they are shielded by an executive branch that ignores the law \u2014 face extraordinary risk. Even if Trump does not enforce the law, his successor might.<\/p>\n

So why did the Court uphold the law?<\/h2>\n

A short summary of the Court\u2019s holding in TikTok v. Garland<\/em> is that the justices believed that the risk of China using TikTok to spy on Americans is so great that it dwarfs any free speech concerns that arise out of this law. As the Court repeatedly notes, about 170 million people in the United States use TikTok. And the app collects a vast array of information from its users that could potentially be obtained by the Chinese government.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the Court writes, TikTok\u2019s Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, \u201cis subject to Chinese laws that require it to \u2018assist or cooperate\u2019 with the Chinese Government\u2019s \u2018intelligence work\u2019<\/a> and to ensure that the Chinese Government has \u2018the power to access and control private data\u2019 the company holds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among other things, the Court cites a congressional report that found that \u201cTikTok\u2019s \u2018data collection practices extend to age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages sent through the application, and videos watched.\u2019\u201d This information could potentially be used by the Chinese government to target or even blackmail federal officials or high-ranking corporate executives \u2014 suppose, for example, that TikTok\u2019s data revealed that a Cabinet secretary was repeatedly in the same hotel room with a woman that is not his wife.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that the government has long prohibited foreign nations and companies from owning key US communications infrastructure, so the Court\u2019s decision is consistent with that history. The Radio Act of 1912, for example, only permitted US citizens to obtain a radio operator\u2019s license<\/a>. And current US law includes similar prohibitions on foreign control of broadcast radio stations.<\/p>\n

Despite this law and precedent, the Court did go out of its way to emphasize that its decision is narrow and should not be read to broadly permit the government to decide who should own media companies. As the Court says, \u201cTikTok\u2019s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment\u201d from other such companies.<\/p>\n

The Court adds that \u201ca law targeting any other speaker would by necessity entail a distinct inquiry and separate considerations.\u201d<\/p>\n

One important legal question in TikTok<\/em> was what \u201clevel of scrutiny\u201d should apply to the TikTok ban. In First Amendment cases, courts apply a particularly skeptical legal test (known as \u201cstrict scrutiny<\/a>\u201d) to any law that attempts to regulate the content of speech \u2014 meaning that the law targets which message a particular speaker intends to convey. Courts give less rigorous review to laws that do not target the content of speech, even if that law has some incidental effect on free speech.<\/p>\n

Though the TikTok<\/em> opinion does not fully resolve this question, it does conclude that the TikTok ban is \u201cfacially content neutral\u201d and is not subject to strict scrutiny. As the Court writes, the law is justified by the government\u2019s desire to prevent \u201cChina from collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million U.S. TikTok users.\u201d It is not motivated by a desire to suppress any particular idea or viewpoint. If TikTok sells itself to an American company tomorrow, the law will permit any speaker to convey any message they want on TikTok.<\/p>\n

In any event, the upshot of Friday\u2019s opinion is that the courts will not intervene in this dispute over whether TikTok should be allowed to operate in the United States so long as it is subject to Chinese control. That does not mean that the law will be fully enforced. And it does not mean that incoming President Trump will not find some way to neutralize the law, if he wants to.<\/p>\n

But, for now, the TikTok ban is set to go into effect on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Baus of Charleston, South Carolina, holds a sign that reads \u201cKeep TikTok,\u201d as she and other content creators stand outside the Supreme Court. | Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law that effectively bans the social media app TikTok in the United States, unless the platform\u2019s China-based owner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}