President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t want social media platform TikTok banned — yet. Congress passed H.R. 7521 and outgoing President Joe Biden signed it on April 24. The ban, under the Orwellian name Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, goes into effect on Jan. 19, a day before the new president takes office. TikTok has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a Dec. 27 brief, D. John Sauer, the incoming solicitor general, asked the court to stay the ban’s implementation “while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump’s incoming Administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution.”
The ban’s key language in the congressional summary: “This bill prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok).” In this case, the ban was rushed through amid hysteria that the Chinese government would collect information on Americans and influence them through the platform. The president can cancel the ban if the president determines TikTok has executed a “qualified divestiture.” Biden has not done that.
TikTok’s Dec. 16 filing maintained the ban is “a massive and unprecedented speech restriction.” And the service is provided here by TikTok Inc, “an American company that is indirectly owned by ByteDance Ltd., a Cayman holding company majority-owned by institutional investors.” That is, it’s not owned by China.
When the issue was debated last March, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, appeared on Fox News and listed ByteDance’s ownership: 60% by international investors, 20% by its Chinese co-founders and 20% by employees, including 7,000 Americans. “It’s a complicated ownership, but it’s not owned by the government” of China, Paul said.
The ACLU also weighed in on Dec. 6, when the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. “This ruling sets a flawed and dangerous precedent, one that gives the government far too much power to silence Americans’ speech online,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. The ban “blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.”
As to what Trump might do, he boasted of his own TikTok account at a Dec. 22 meeting in Phoenix, “They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while.’”
Democracy functions only when free speech is allowed the freest expression. In these times that increasingly means such social media as X, Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok and thousands of others.
There’s also a generation gap. The average age of the outgoing 118th Congress is 57.9 years for the House and 64 years for the Senate. Most have no clue what their grandchildren are doing with their smartphones. But banning an app used by 170 million Americans is the worst example of what it means to be a free American.
Unfortunately, the ban was backed by local Republican Reps. Mike Garcia, Michelle Steel, Young Kim, Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa; and by Democratic Reps. Mike Levin, Lou Correa and Adam Schiff, now a U.S. Senator. Commendably opposing were Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Robert Garcia and Jimmy Gomez.
The Supreme Court should follow Trump’s request to let him take office and work out a deal. Better, it should just reject H.R. 7521 entirely as an affront to free people.
