Supreme Court upholds law that bans TikTok in the US unless it changes ownership. How will it be applied?
Today, the US Supreme Court unanimously confirmed the federal law that bans the social network TikTok starting next Sunday, January 19, unless it is sold by its parent company based in China.. The measure maintains that the risk to national security raised by its ties to China outweighs concerns about limiting the freedom of expression of the application and its 170 million users in the United States. The decision came in the context of a unusual political upheaval by President-elect Donald Trump – who promised he could negotiate a solution – and the outgoing administration of Joe Biden, who has indicated that he will not apply the law starting Sunday, his last full day in office. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement saying that “TikTok should continue to be available to Americans,” but that national security issues should be addressed. “Given the mere fact that it is time, this administration recognizes that actions to implement the law must simply fall to the next administration, which takes office on Monday,” he added. How does this affect current users? The bipartisan law requires that ByteDance, owner of TikTok based in China, will divest the company on Sunday, a day before Trump takes office. If no sales occur, the platform used by millions of Americans will theoretically be banned. A sale does not seem imminent And while experts have said the app won’t disappear from existing users’ phones once the law goes into effect on Jan. 19, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That will eventually render the app inoperative, said the Department of Justice In court documents, he highlighted Associated Press. In a rapidly changing situation, It is unclear what will happen on Sunday with TikTok in the United States, as there are signs that Trump could try to keep the app available. The Biden administration has also signaled that it will not take any enforcement action on Sunday. The Justice Department had raised two key issues in defending the ban: that the Chinese government could exercise control over content that users see to influence public opinion, and that could collect sensitive data over millions of American users. In today’s ruling, the court acknowledged that national security reasons affected its analysis of whether there was a violation of freedom of expression under the First Amendment of the Constitutionand the judges focused on the issue of data collection. The high court concluded that the reasons for enacting the law are “decidedly content-agnostic” and have nothing to do with restricting certain speech. “TikTok’s scale and its susceptibility to control by foreign adversaries, coupled with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the government’s national security concerns,” the supreme ruling said. “The challenged provisions promote an important governmental interest unrelated to the suppression of free speech and do not substantially burden free speech more than is necessary to promote that interest,” the court added. “The anti-TikTok sentiment that led Congress to pass the law, driven by concerns about the level of control the Chinese government has over the company, has quickly dissipated in some quarters,” he said. NBC News.
