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digital rights
'Major Blow to Freedom of Expression': US Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban
One ACLU campaigner blasted the justices for "giving the executive branch unprecedented power to silence speech it doesn't like."
Jan 17, 2025
The United States Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld a federal law banning TikTok if its Chinese parent company does not sell the popular social media app by Sunday.
The justices ruled in TikTok v. Garland, an unsigned opinion, that "Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok's data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary."
"The problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional," the high court wrote. "Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another."
President Joe Biden
signed legislation last April forcing ByteDance, which owns TikTok, to sell the app to a non-Chinese company within a year or face a nationwide ban. Proponents of the ban cited national security concerns, while digital rights and free speech defenders condemned the law.
Approximately 170 million Americans use TikTok, which is especially popular with younger people and small-to-medium-sized businesses, and contributes tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy annually.
The ACLU—which this week calledTikTok v. Garland "one of the most important First Amendment cases of our time"—condemned Friday's decision as "a major blow to freedom of expression online."
"The Supreme Court's ruling is incredibly disappointing, allowing the government to shut down an entire platform and the free speech rights of so many based on fear-mongering and speculation," ACLU National Security Project deputy director Patrick Toomey said in a statement.
"By refusing to block this ban, the Supreme Court is giving the executive branch unprecedented power to silence speech it doesn't like, increasing the danger that sweeping invocations of 'national security' will trump our constitutional rights," Toomey added.
The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in response to Friday's ruling, "We are deeply disappointed that the court failed to require the strict First Amendment scrutiny required in a case like this, which would've led to the inescapable conclusion that the government's desire to prevent potential future harm had to be rejected as infringing millions of Americans' constitutionally protected free speech."
"We are disappointed to see the court sweep past the undisputed content-based justification for the law—to control what speech Americans see and share with each other—and rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns," EFF added.
The Biden administration
said Friday that it would leave enforcement of any ban up to the incoming Trump administration.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Republican U.S President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office next week, is weighing an executive order to suspend enforcement of the ban for 60-90 days.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who earlier this week introduced a bill to delay ByteDance's sale deadline until October, said Friday: "I am deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the TikTok ban. I am not done fighting to pass my 270-day extension. We need more time."
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State AGs Launch Lawsuit Against TikTok for Harming Children
"We are suing TikTok to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis," explained New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Oct 08, 2024
Attorneys general from over a dozen states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday announced lawsuits against TikTok, accusing the company behind the popular social media platform of deliberately making the site addictive for children and deceiving the public about its dangers.
"We're suing the social media giant TikTok for exploiting young users and deceiving the public about the dangers the platform poses to our youth," Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta
explained Tuesday morning in San Francisco. "Together, with my fellow state AGs, we will hold TikTok to account, stop its exploitation of our young people, and end its deceit."
New York Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, said in a
statement that "young people are struggling with their mental health because of addictive social media platforms like TikTok."
"TikTok claims that their platform is safe for young people, but that is far from true," she continued. "In New York and across the country, young people have died or gotten injured doing dangerous TikTok challenges and many more are feeling more sad, anxious, and depressed because of TikTok's addictive features."
"Today, we are suing TikTok to protect young people and help combat the nationwide youth mental health crisis," James added. "Kids and families across the country are desperate for help to address this crisis, and we are doing everything in our power to protect them."
James' office said in a
statement:
TikTok uses a variety of addictive features to keep users on its platform longer, which leads to poorer mental health outcomes. Multiple studies have found a link between excessive social media use, poor sleep quality, and poor mental health among young people. According to the U.S. surgeon general, young people who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.
According to James' office, TikTok's addictive features include:
- Around-the-clock notifications that can lead to poor sleep patterns for young users;
- Autoplay of an endless stream of videos that manipulates users into compulsively spending more time on the platform with no option to disable;
- Attention-grabbing content that keeps young users on the platform longer;
- TikTok "stories" and TikTok live content that is only available temporarily to entice users to tune in immediately or lose the opportunity to interact;
- A highlighted "likes" and comments section as a form of social validation, which can impact young users' self-esteem; and
- Beauty filters that alter one's appearance and can lower young users' self-esteem.
The attorneys general also accuse TikTok of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which is meant to shield children's online data; of falsely claiming that its platform is safe for children; and of lying about the effectiveness of its so-called safety tools meant to mitigate harms to youth.
In addition to California and New York, the following states are part of the new lawsuit: Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington. So is the District of Columbia.
All told, 23 states have now filed lawsuits targeting TikTok's harms to children.
However, the issue is by no means limited to TikTok. Last October, dozens of U.S. states
sued Meta—which owns the social media sites Facebook and Instagram—for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by designing their apps to be addictive, especially to minors.
Twitter, the social platform known as X since shortly after it was
purchased by Elon Musk in 2022 for $44 billion, was sued in 2021 by child sex trafficking victims for allowing the publication of sexually explicit images of minors and refusing to remove them as requested by the plaintiffs and their parents.
Last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
published a report detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms. The report's publication sparked renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation including the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to better safeguard minors against the companies' predatory practices.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization
warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
The two bills—which were
overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. Senate in July—were last month approved for advancement in the House of Representatives.
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
Some critics are wary of singling out TikTok—which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—for political or xenophobic purposes.
Earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a $95 billion foreign aid package containing a possible nationwide TikTok ban. The legislation requires ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company within a year or face a federal ban. TikTok subsequently sued the federal government over the potential ban.
Approximately 170 million Americans use TikTok, which is especially popular among members of Gen-Z and small-to-medium-sized businesses, and contributes tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy annually.
Evan Greer, who heads the digital rights group Fight for the Future, slammed the law as "one of the stupidest and most authoritarian pieces of tech legislation we've seen in years."
However, children's advocates welcomed the new lawsuits.
"We are pleased to see so many state attorneys general holding TikTok accountable for deliberately causing harms to young people," said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay. "Between state and private lawsuits, state legislation, and Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions, the tide is turning against Big Tech, and it's clear the status quo of social media companies harming kids cannot and will not continue."
"Now we need leaders in the House to join their Senate counterparts in passing the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act so that all platforms, not just those involved in legal settlements, will have to be safe by design for children from day one," Golin added.
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Biden Signs TikTok Ban—Among the 'Stupidest and Most Authoritarian' Tech Bills
One critic said that "the bill doesn't touch the homegrown spyware U.S. companies churn out" and "also strikes at the First Amendment right to receive information."
Apr 24, 2024
Digital rights defenders on Wednesday slammed the passage of a U.S. foreign aid package containing a possible nationwide TikTok ban as unconstitutional, xenophobic, and ill-advised during an election year in which President Joe Biden desperately needs as many young votes as possible.
Biden signed the $95 billion bill late Wednesday morning after senators voted 79-18 the previous evening to approve the package, which includes tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel—which is waging a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
One of the bill's provisions would force ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, to sell the app to a non-Chinese company within a year or face a federal ban. Approximately 170 million Americans use TikTok, which is especially popular among members of Gen-Z and small-to-medium-sized businesses, and
contributes tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy annually.
"Whether it's dressed up as a ban or a forced sale, the bill targeting TikTok is one of the stupidest and most authoritarian pieces of tech legislation we've seen in years," Fight for the Future director Evan Greer said in a statement.
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, called the provision "nothing more than an unconstitutional ban in disguise."
"Banning a social media platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use to express themselves would have devastating consequences for all of our First Amendment rights, and will almost certainly be struck down in court," she added.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University,
said:
The First Amendment means that the government can't restrict Americans' access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here. Repackaging the government's reasons for the ban in the language of "national security" does not change the analysis. There's no national security exception to the First Amendment, and creating such an exception would make the First Amendment a dead letter.
Proponents of the possible ban attempted to spin it as something else and pointed to precedents including the 2020 forced sale of the popular LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr, formerly owned by a Chinese company.
"I want to be very clear: This is not a 'TikTok ban,'" Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who voted to approve the bill, said in a statement. "I have no interest in banning TikTok. This bill will simply make TikTok safer by separating it from the Chinese Communist Party so that the data of 170 million Americans—many of whom are children—is protected."
Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said before Tuesday's vote that "Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel."
"Banning TikTok without passing real tech regulation will just further entrench monopolies like Meta and Google, without doing anything to protect Americans from data harvesting or government propaganda."
However, Kate Ruane, who directs the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, asserted that "Congress shouldn't be in the business of banning platforms. They should be working to enact comprehensive privacy legislation that protects our private data no matter where we choose to engage online."
Greer said that "not only is this bill laughably unconstitutional and a blatant assault on free expression and human rights, it's also a perfect way to derail momentum toward more meaningful policies like privacy and antitrust legislation that would actually address the harms of Big Tech and surveillance capitalism."
Greer continued:
Banning TikTok without passing real tech regulation will just further entrench monopolies like Meta and Google, without doing anything to protect Americans from data harvesting or government propaganda.
We could be months away from another Trump administration, and top Democrats are busy expanding mass surveillance authority and setting the precedent that the government can ban an entire social media app based on vague 'national security' concerns that haven't been explained to the public.
Some critics questioned the wisdom of Biden signing off on a potential ban of the most popular social media app among many young users during an election year in which many younger voters are disappointed in the president's record on climate, student debt relief, the Gaza genocide, and more.
One user of X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, said earlier this year that signing the bill would demonstrate a "comical level of political malpractice, the equivalent of seeing the rake on the ground and purposefully stepping on it."
Moments after Biden signed the bill, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew
vowed, "We aren't going anywhere."
"The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail again," he said, referring to the three times when federal judges blocked efforts to ban TikTok.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew responds to the bill that could ban the app: “Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban of TikTok and a ban on you and your voice.”
“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere.”
pic.twitter.com/qElI8JvY0D
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) April 24, 2024
In the most recent case, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy ruled last December that a Montana law that would have banned the app "violates the Constitution in more ways than one" and had a "pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment."
It is unclear who would buy TikTok. Analysts estimate the platform is worth upward of $100 billion, placing it out of reach for all but the biggest U.S. tech titans and, ironically, setting up possible antitrust challenges from the very administration that ultimately forced the sale.
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