The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that says Congress acted within the law when it passed a “sell-or-ban” law targeting TikTok, the Chinese social media app that has grave national security concerns.
TikTok has problems that other social media companies don’t: For one, it’s owned by the Chinese, and that means the Chinese communist government has control of it. In China, the content is aimed at educating China’s young people, but in America, the content is aimed at destroying them and making them stupider.
The justices, in an unusual unanimous decision, said that Congress did not violate the First Amendment when it passed the law due to national security concerns.
“As of January 19, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act will make it unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain, or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U. S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control. Petitioners are two TikTok operating entities and a group of U. S. TikTok users. We consider whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment. In doing so, we are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative capabilities,” the court wrote in its summary.
This challenging new context counsels caution on our part. As Justice Frankfurter advised 80 years ago in considering the application of established legal rules to the “totally new problems” raised by the airplane and radio, we should take care not to “embarrass the future.”
One of the functions of TikTok is that the app has access to your phone and can get access to your photos, videos and contacts. It also tracks where you are. The terms in the conditions also apply to the ability of TikTok to monitor any device on the same network. So if you use wifi to monitor your home or office, TikTok may have a backdoor to those other devices. It’s a form of spyware, critics say.
The court ruling gives TikTok until Sunday, a challenging deadline for any company to meet.
Read the entire ruling here:
