Tik Tok has been banned in the United States.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the bill signed by President Joe Biden, ByteDance, the Chinese owners of Tik Tok, have until January 19th, mere days away, to sell the popular social media site or be banned.
This ban doesn’t mean that current users can’t access the app. Rather, the app would be removed from the Google and Apple app stores, making it so that new users can’t download the app and existing users can’t update it. The government hopes that as the app gets buggier without updates and eventually unusable people will naturally migrate away from the app.
“I think we should get rid of Tik Tok,” Jude Remke, a Highland sophomore, said. “It’s a time waste.”
The government says that Tik Tok is a national security threat. They worry that China could pressure ByteDance to reveal data about Americans through Tik Tok’s algorithm, and that China could covertly push Chinese propaganda to Americans without their knowledge. While there is no evidence of this, American officials are increasingly worried as global tensions rise.
“I don’t have Tik Tok, so it’s not going to make a difference to me,” Darya Ispolatova, a junior at Highland, said. “If China wanted to infiltrate the United States, I don’t see how that’s the best way to do so.”
The Supreme Court ruled that the law does not infringe on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression, claiming that congress is fine with user’s speech on the app, just without a “foreign adversary” collecting data on the users, according to Chief Justice John Roberts.
“I think there’s more cons than pros to the ban; I don’t think it’ll actually help,” George Smith, a senior at Highland, said. “I think it’s a little bit of an attempt to control the media. While I don’t think it’s an infringement of free speech, I don’t think it’s good.”
The Biden administration has said that they will leave it up to Trump to decide whether it will be enforced, something Trump has said he will not do. Trump wants to prolong the ban in order to give more time for an American buyer to purchase the app. What the actual fate of the app will be remains to be seen.
