The administration of the short video platform TikTok has made a last attempt to continue working with the United States. She appealed to the Supreme Court to suspend a law requiring China’s ByteDance to abandon the service by January 19 or face a ban on its operation in the country.
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TikTok and ByteDance have filed an emergency injunction asking the court to stop the upcoming ban on the platform, which is used by about 170 million American citizens. The two companies need this time to appeal a lower court decision that upheld the law. A group of TikTok users in the US filed a similar request. Congress passed the law in April, and the head of state signed it then.
The basis for its adoption was the fears of the Ministry of Justice, according to which TikTok, as a Chinese company, poses a “threat to national security of colossal depth and scale”: it has access to huge amounts of personal data of Americans – from location to personal correspondence on the platform – as well as the ability secretly manipulate the content Americans view on the app. On December 6, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected TikTok’s arguments that the law violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech.
The social network said that Americans who are properly informed of the risks of manipulating the recommendation algorithm have the right to continue to use the platform, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment. If the court’s decision remains in effect, Congress will be able to unlimitedly “prohibit citizens of a country from speaking simply by pointing out the risk that the speech is under the influence of a foreign organization.” Banning the platform for even one month threatens TikTok with losing a third of its American audience; the administration of the social network insists that there is no immediate threat to national security from its side; delaying the ban will allow the Supreme Court to evaluate the legality of the ban, and the Donald Trump administration to evaluate the law itself. If it comes into force, then “the day before the presidential inauguration, one of the most popular platforms in America will close”; blocking a service used by half of Americans is “something extraordinary.”
The day before, Trump said in an interview that he “has a warm place in his heart for TikTok” and promised to “consider” blocking the platform. He also held a meeting with the general director of the service Shou Zi Chew the day before, Reuters reports, citing its own source. If the law comes into force, TikTok and other services controlled by “unfriendly US states” will lose the right to provide certain services in the country – in particular, Apple and Google will be prohibited from distributing their applications. To avoid this measure, which effectively amounts to blocking, ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, must sell the platform by a deadline. The same fate may await other foreign applications; in 2020, Trump unsuccessfully tried to block WeChat, a popular messenger in China, on the same grounds.