Why is TikTok getting banned? What is behind the law that can close the app

Washington — The 170 million TikTok users in the United States could be in for a rude awakening come Sunday if they suddenly find that the hugely popular video-sharing app is unavailable due to a law passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress last year.

Lawmakers and US officials have sounded the alarm for years about the perceived risks TikTok’s ties to China pose to national security, and Congress moved last year to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app or face being cut off. the American market. The law gave the company a deadline of January 19 – one day before a new president would take office.

That deadline is now here, with no sign of a sale in sight. TikTok’s latest legal challenge failed on Friday, when the Supreme Court said the law does not violate the first amendment.

The Biden White House said it will leave enforcement of the law to the incoming Trump administration, and President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to “save” the app. But TikTok has hinted that it could still take itself offline once the law takes effect, a move that would leave content creators and users in the lurch as the company looks for a way to get back on firm legal footing.

Here’s what you need to know about the TikTok ban and how we got here:

Why did Congress want to ban TikTok?

US officials have repeatedly warned that TikTok threatens national security because the Chinese government could use it as a tool to spy on Americans or covertly influence the American public by amplifying or suppressing certain content.

The concern is justified, they said, because Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering. FBI Director Christopher Wray told members of the House Intelligence Committee last year that the Chinese government could compromise Americans’ devices through the software.

When the House passed the Divestment or Ban Act in April 2024, compared Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, the one with a “spy balloon in Americans’ phones.” Late. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said lawmakers learned in classified briefings “how reams of data are being collected and shared in ways that are not well aligned with American security interests.”

“Why is it a security threat?” This was said by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri on Friday. “If you have TikTok on your phone right now, it can track your whereabouts, it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records.”

If the Chinese government gets their hands on that information, “it’s not just a national security threat, it’s a personal security threat,” Hawley said.

In 2022, TikTok began an initiative known as “Project Texas” to protect American users’ data on servers in the United States and ease lawmakers’ fears. The Justice Department said the plan was inadequate because it still allowed some US data to flow to China.

Although the divestment or ban law was passed with bipartisan support, some lawmakers have been critical of the measure, agreeing with TikTok that it infringes on Americans’ freedom of speech.

“Most of the reasons the government banned it were based on allegations, not evidence,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said Friday. “(TikTok has) never been prosecuted and found guilty of sharing information with the communist government.”

Others have changed their tune as the deadline for a ban neared, including Trump, who tried to ban the app with an executive order during his first term that was struck down in the courts.

“The irony of all this is that Donald Trump was the first to point out that there is a problem,” said the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. Warner said the Trump administration “did a good job of convincing me and overwhelming members of Congress” about the risks.

TikTok has its day at the Supreme Court

Under arguments before the Supreme Court on January 10, TikTok’s lawyer did not deny the potential national security risks as the judges appeared to be critical of the company’s legal challenge.

“I think Congress and the president were concerned that China was getting access to information about millions of Americans, tens of thousands of Americans, including teenagers, people in their 20s, that they would use that information over time to develop spies, to turn people into extortionists, people who a generation from now will be working in the FBI or the CIA or the State Department,” Judge Brett Kavanaugh said. “Isn’t that a realistic assessment by Congress and the president of the risks here?”

Noel Francisco, representing TikTok, responded: “I don’t dispute the risks. I dispute the means they’ve chosen.”

Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that TikTok is collecting “unprecedented amounts” of personal data that would be “incredibly valuable” to the Chinese government by giving it “a powerful tool for harassment, recruitment and espionage.”

“For years, the Chinese government has sought to build detailed profiles of Americans, where we live and work, who our friends and colleagues are, what our interests are and what our vices are,” she said, referring to major data breaches that the U.S. hair. attributed to China over the past decade, including the hack of the Office of Personnel Management that compromised the personal information of millions of federal employees.

The Supreme Court’s TikTok decision

By defending the law before the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice pointed to two significant national security rationales: countering China’s collection of data from TikTok’s 170 million US users and its alleged ability to manipulate content on the app to advance its geopolitical interests.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling hinged on the first rationale: that through the app and its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, China can collect vast amounts of information from American users. The justices found that Congress did not violate the First Amendment by acting to address this threat. Congress, it said, “had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment.”

The court declined to uphold the government’s interest in stopping China’s alleged covert manipulation of content, which the Biden administration had cited as a national security justification for the law.

“One man’s ‘hidden content manipulation’ is another man’s ‘editorial discretion,'” Gorsuch wrote in an opinion agreeing with the ruling. “Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all stripes routinely make less than transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Undoubtedly, the First Amendment has a lot to say about the right to make those choices.”

Grace Kazarian,

Alan He and Melissa Quinn contributed to this report.