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TikTok is probably going away soon. A law passed earlier this year required China’s Byte Dance to sell off the US part of their business or face being banned next month. TikTok sued claiming the law was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Today a federal appeals court ruled the ban could stand.
The company argued that the law unfairly singled out TikTok and that a ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights of American users.
The judges disagreed with TikTok’s argument. They said the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary,” and didn’t run afoul of the First Amendment. “The government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States,” the judges wrote on Friday.
American lawmakers and intelligence officials have said that TikTok poses a national security threat under ByteDance. They say that the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to use the app to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred. They have also noted that apps like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China and that the country does not allow TikTok there.
As I’ve said before, the most shocking thing about this entire case is the hypocrisy of China, a police state which monitors and controls all internet traffic, threating those who speak ill of the communist dictatorship with arrest. These are the people demanding their rights under the US First Amendment. But as the judge who wrote today’s opinion concluded, the First Amendment isn’t at stake here.
