After approximately 12 hours of darkness in the U.S., TikTok returned Sunday, and parent company ByteDance credited Donald Trump for its return after he promised an executive order to stall the American ban on the social media app.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal law, signed by now former President Joe Biden in April 2024, putting national security first because ByteDance is a Chinese-based company and therefore subject to influence by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The law stated that ByteDance must sell TikTok to a non-China based company by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a ban in the U.S.
According to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the law was to take effect although lawmakers had no specific evidence of China using the social media platform to spy on Americans.
“It’s particularly ironic that the Supreme Court is upholding the ban on national security grounds when both the incoming and outgoing presidents are backtracking from their prior support of the ban. Are they implying that neither administration cares about national security? It appears this ban was a political stunt that the Biden administration didn’t expect would ever become law. But now it has, and it might not even be enforced. All we might be left with at the end of the day is a Supreme Court opinion that weakens First Amendment freedoms on the internet,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), said Friday.
The FPF said in a statement Friday that the Supreme Court cited a law that requires companies based in China to cooperate with government surveillance. However, according to the FPF, the U.S. Congress passed a law in 2024 allowing the federal government to enlist American businesses involuntarily to spy on the government’s behalf.
“This opinion practically begs foreign governments to ban American apps for the same reasons America banned TikTok. If we don’t like China’s practices on surveillance and censorship, we should stop adopting them back home,” Stern said.
Before TikTok‘s case suing because of censorship in America, the Supreme Court honored that Americans have a right to consume foreign propaganda if they choose and that the threat of national security is not reason enough to censor free speech. In the case of TikTok, the Court focused on data privacy and ignored concerns for free speech.
Stern said that a ban now or later on TikTok will not end threats to American privacy until the U.S. has a comprehensive data privacy law. But shutting down a social media platform that 170 million Americans use, including journalists, restricts free speech.
As for the second term of Trump as president, the FPF expects more attacks on freedom of speech, despite Trump promising otherwise in his inaugural speech. The FPF expects more investigations of whistleblowers in the U.S. as were seen during Trump’s first term as president.
FPF said today that the Biden Administration‘s continued prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange after Trump’s first term has set the stage for prosecution of journalists.
Lastly, the FPF is concerned about federal government surveillance of the American press.
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Rebecca Barnabi
