Banning TikTok won’t solve your data-security problem
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. During last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris regularly posted on TikTok, encouraging voters to follow her on the platform, as did Joe Biden before he withdrew. Yet the Biden Justice Department is set to argue before the Supreme Court this week that the popular Chinese-owned social-media app, used monthly by around 170 million Americans, represents a grave threat to our national security.
Huh? When Donald Trump tried to ban the app during his first presidency, a federal court blocked his executive order on the grounds that singling out the company was “arbitrary and capricious." Mr. Trump also cited the nation’s safety, but lately he has become a huge fan of the app. “Why would I want to ban TikTok?" he wrote on Truth Social last week, above a bar graph that showed his TikTok views outpacing not only Ms.
Harris’s but also those of Tucker Carlson and Taylor Swift. For much of the political class, however, TikTok has remained a target. In April, Mr.
Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The bipartisan legislation requires TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face a ban in America.
TikTok sued, arguing that the law violates free-speech protections under the First Amendment. In a December ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected those claims.
“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security," Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote. TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments on Jan. 10.
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