When US president-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20, 2025, there will be an urgent matter to handle from the previous day: TikTok. It is on January 19 that the law requiring this Chinese app to be banned – unless it has been sold to non-Chinese interests – will come into effect. Trump will have to decide whether or not to try to save TikTok, which is very popular in the United States, with 170 million users.
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, had hoped to delay the law's enforcement by invoking the US Constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression, but this plan suffered a severe setback on Friday, December 6, when all three judges on a federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected its appeal to overturn the law.
"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg in the 92-page decision. "Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States."
The outgoing US president, Joe Biden, signed the bill into law in April as part of a bipartisan agreement between Democrats and Republicans. Lawmakers had received confidential information from the intelligence community about the potential national security risks posed by the app, such as China's ability to use it to monitor Americans and to spread Chinese propaganda. Evidence for these threats and risks has never been made public.
But the judges, in their lengthy decision, echo this argument, arguing that China "could direct the TikTok platform to covertly manipulate the content flowing to U.S. users" and "exploit sensitive data on individual Americans to undermine U.S. interests, including by recruiting assets, identifying Americans involved in intelligence, and pressuring and blackmailing our citizens to assist China." The decision also points out that this issue dates back to Trump's first term (2017-2021): "Two consecutive presidents understandably identified TikTok as a significant vulnerability, but "even after extended negotiations, TikTok could not satisfactorily resolve the Government’s concerns."
Since the end of Trump's first term, multiple solutions have been considered, such as entrusting TikTok's data management to the digital giant Oracle or having the company taken over by Microsoft. Then, in 2024, both Steven Mnuchin, a financier and Trump's former Treasury secretary, and Frank McCourt, a sports and media billionaire, expressed interest in purchasing the platform, but China opposed its sale. Furthermore, the sky-high valuations common for this kind of company make a takeover extremely difficult. The New York Times values it at over $200 billion (€189.1 billion). By way of comparison, Meta is currently worth $1,570 billion on the stock market.
You have 46.44% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.