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Connor Vogel
A nationwide ban of the social media platform TikTok went into effect across the U.S. on Jan. 19.
For about 12 hours.
The ban was temporarily lifted when President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the federal government to delay the law for 75 days on Jan. 20. The proclamation gives the app’s China-based owner, ByteDance, the opportunity to sell a majority stake in the platform or reach a deal with Trump.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — a bipartisan bill making it a crime, punishable with fines up to $5000 a day for any U.S. company that uses TikTok — has been fighting legal challenges since signed into law on April 24, 2024. TikTok’s lawyers argued that the ban would violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.
This quarrel ended after the Supreme Court upheld the law banning TikTok in a 9-0 decision on Jan. 17. In the released opinion, the court ruled that the law didn’t violate citizens’ free speech.
“There were a couple differences of views among some of the justices, but at a basic level, the justices said that there was a legitimate governmental interest in the data security piece,” attorney Mark Cole said. “So they passed a law to restrict a foreign adversary’s ability to gather, collect and utilize data from 170 million Americans.”
Former East soccer coach and head of the cybersecurity firm Tenfold Security Aaron Weissenfluh believes the court made the right decision. Working to protect his clients’ digital information, he’s seen the potential threats to data security TikTok poses firsthand.
According to Weissenfluh, the app isn’t just taking user data, but also information from third-party sites and devices on the same network.
“[Banning TikTok] really hit home for us [at Tenfold],” Weissenfluh said. “For example, we have a university that we protect, and we kept getting alerts that devices wanted to connect to the network. They’d immediately scan the entire network for hosts, looking to see if there are vulnerabilities on the network or what other devices they could get to.”
After digging through the list of connected devices, Weissenfluh and his team concluded TikTok’s software was accessing the network every time someone used the university’s Wi-Fi.
The collection of users’ private information is nothing new for apps, but the issue with TikTok is its ties to the People’s Republic of China’s government, according to East AP Government teacher Jacob Penner.
“Any of the data that TikTok collects over US companies is technically accessible to the Chinese government as well,” Penner said. “They’re not private in the way that they would need a search warrant. For instance, our government is bound by the Fourth Amendment in search and seizure.”
This means that as a foreign company, TikTok doesn’t have the same protections guaranteed under the law to protect their data from being taken by the government without probable cause.
In order to prevent the ban from going into effect, ByteDance must sell a majority share in TikTok to U.S. buyers within 90 days, according to the bill.
In a statement on Jan. 21, Trump warned China against attempting to block any deal made with the U.S. before the 75-day executive order ends, saying he would consider it an act of “hostility” and “put tariffs of 25%, 30%, 50%, even 100%,” according to Forbes.
But even with the action from the executive branch, bringing back the app to devices has yet to occur. Many tech companies, including Google and Apple, refuse to bring TikTok back to their platforms for updates and future downloads.
This is because, under the law, returning the ByteDance-owned TikTok to app stores would be illegal and potentially subject them to billions of dollars in fines. Trump taking executive action does little to change that, according to NPR.
This has caused issues for several people who make their livelihood on TikTok. For East science teacher Joshua Parker, who has over 200k followers, the threat of a ban could impact his side-hustle as a content creator.
“It affects more than just people’s data,” Parker said. “Some people build businesses off of [TikTok] and do a lot of good with it. I think there’s always some chance of a data leak, but I have the same chances of my data leaked from a credit card company or my bank.”
For people who already deleted the app, getting it back through the Apple store won’t be possible. Now, other sites like Instagram and Xiaohongshu — also known as RedNote, a popular social media site in China — have begun to fill the gap.
While access to the app is restored temporarily for existing users, many others will continue to find ways to access it even if the app is banned through the use of VPN or illegal websites, the future of the platform remains in limbo.
“If security controls are too difficult, people will always find a way around it,” Weissenfluh said. “Everybody will eventually, and I think that will be the case if TikTok is finally banned.”
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