Washington – 170 million TikTok users in the US may face a rude awakening Come Sunday they suddenly discover that the hugely popular video-sharing app is inaccessible due to a law passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress last year.
Lawmakers and U.S. officials have warned for years about the perceived threats to national security posed by TikTok's ties to China, and Congress last year allowed TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app or spin it off. Was forced to happen. American market. The law gave the company a deadline of January 19 – the day before the new president takes office.
That deadline has now arrived, with no signs of a sale showing. TikTok's last legal challenge failed on Friday, When the Supreme Court said The law does not violate the First Amendment.
The Biden White House said it would leave enforcement of the law to the incoming Trump administration, and President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to “save” the app. But TikTok has signaled it may take itself offline even after the law takes effect, a move that would put content creators and users at odds as the company looks for a way back to a stronger legal position.
In a statement provided to CBS News on Friday evening, TikTok said that “the statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Justice Department fail to provide the necessary clarity and assurances to service providers who are required to maintain the availability of TikTok.” Are integral parts.” More than 170 million Americans. Unless the Biden administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most important service providers assuring non-enforcement, TikTok will unfortunately be forced to go dark on January 19.
Here's what to know about the TikTok ban and how we got here:
Why did Congress want to ban TikTok?
American officials have repeatedly caution TikTok poses a national security threat because the Chinese government could use it as a medium to spy on Americans or covertly influence the American public by amplifying or suppressing certain content.
The concern is justified, he said, as Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate in intelligence gathering. FBI Director Christopher Wray told members of the House Intelligence Committee last year that the Chinese government could compromise Americans' devices through software.
As the House took up divestment-or-sanctions legislation in April 2024, Texas Republican Representative Michael McCaul compared it to “spy balloons in Americans' phones.” Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said lawmakers learned in the classified briefing how “rivers of data are being collected and shared in ways that do not align well with American security interests.”
“Why is this a safety hazard?” Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said Friday. “If you currently have TikTok on your phone, 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 that information, Hawley said, “it's not just a national security threat, it's a personal security threat.”
In 2022, TikTok launched an initiative called “Project Texas” to secure American users' data on servers in the US and allay 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 legislation passed with bipartisan support, some lawmakers have been critical of the measure, and agree with TikTok that it violates Americans' free speech rights.
“Most of the reasons the government banned it were based on allegations, not evidence,” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said Friday. ,[TikTok has] “Never prosecuted and found not guilty of sharing information with the Communist government.”
Others have changed their tune as the ban deadline approaches, including Trump, who during his first term tried to ban the app with an executive order that was struck down in the courts .
“The irony of all this is that Donald Trump was the first person to point out there was a problem,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday. Warner said the Trump administration “did a very good job of convincing me and members of Congress” about the risks.
TikTok's day has come in the Supreme Court
during Arguments before the Supreme Court On January 10, TikTok's lawyer did not rule out potential national security risks as a judge appeared critical of the company's legal challenge.
“I think Congress and the President were concerned that China was obtaining information on millions of Americans, millions of Americans, including teenagers, people over the age of 20, that they might use that information over time to develop spies, To blackmail people, people who will be working at the FBI or the CIA or the State Department a generation from now.” “Not a realistic assessment of the risks?”
Noel Francisco, representing TikTok, responded, “I'm not disputing the risks. I'm disputing the means that they chose.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth Preloger asserted that TikTok collects an “unprecedented amount” of personal data that would be “incredibly valuable” to the Chinese government by giving it “a powerful tool for harassment, recruitment, and spying.”
“For years, the Chinese government has sought to build detailed profiles about Americans, including where we live and work, who our friends and colleagues are, what our interests are and what our vices are,” he said in a statement by the U.S. Said citing major data breaches. China has been credited with compromising the personal information of millions of federal employees over the past decade, including the hack of the Office of Personnel Management.
Supreme Court's decision on TikTok
In defending the law before the Supreme Court, the Justice Department Pointed to two main national security justifications: Countering China's alleged ability to collect data from TikTok's 170 million US users and manipulate content on the app to advance its geopolitical interests.
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision hinged on the first justification: that China, through the app and its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, could collect vast amounts of information from American users. The justices found that Congress did not violate the First Amendment by taking action to combat that threat. “There was good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment,” Congress said.
The court avoided endorsing the government's interest in preventing China's alleged covert manipulation of the material, which the Biden administration had cited as a national security justification for the law.
“One person's 'secret content manipulation' is another's 'editorial discretion,'” Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion in the decision. “Journalists, publishers and speakers of all kinds routinely make less-than-transparent decisions about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Without question, the First Amendment says a lot about the right to make those choices “
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Contributed to this report.