On Jan. 17, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on TikTok — a subsidiary of Chinese company ByteDance — that made it illegal for companies in the United States to host the platform after Jan. 19 unless “U.S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control,” according to TikTok Inc. v. Garland.
The platform temporarily went dark for 14 hours on Jan. 18, before coming back online on Jan. 19. A day later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to temporarily stop the enforcement of the ban for 75 days. TikTok is still unavailable for download on app stores at the time of publication.
According to government professor Sonu Bedi, Trump’s executive order could raise “questions” about the enforcement of federal laws.
“There is a duly enacted law that the Court has just held is constitutional,” Bedi said. “The president has an oath in the Constitution to ensure that laws are faithfully executed. So how is it, then, that this law is not being faithfully executed when the Court has said that it’s constitutional?”
According to the executive order, Trump used the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — which gives Trump the power to decide on matters of national security and allows him to extend the ban by the supreme court if he finds a buyer for TikTok according to the legislation — to stop the Attorney General from enforcing the ban, citing his “constitutional responsibility” as president to make decisions concerning national security.
Bedi explained that Trump can invoke “his unique constitutional ability as president to conduct foreign affairs” since servicing TikTok is now a “federal crime,” which allows for the executive branch to exercise powers.
“So the executive branch says ‘we’re not going to enforce this law,’ right?” Bedi said. “Then it’s not going to be enforced. [This is] the very kind of separation of powers [Trump] claimed that he had made in his amicus brief to the court for TikTok.”
Nathan Bruschi ’10 — who served as a U.S. naval intelligence officer and worked in national security affairs at the White House under former President Joe Biden — explained that “smart players like Apple and Google” are not “platforming the app” since the executive order “has no effect.”
“The law gives the president the ability to delay, but not block … only if there is an acquisition pending, which at present there is not,” Bruschi said. “So the companies who are keeping TikTok online now are breaking the law, and they are opening themselves up to tremendous legal risk.”
Some students questioned why Congress was prioritizing banning TikTok in the United States. Ivy Wydler ’28, for example, said the app is not “the most pressing thing the United States is dealing with at the moment.”
“I think that there has been a lot of conflicting information about whose idea was to do the ban,” Wydler said. “I think a lot of people have different ideas about it.”
The bill to ban TikTok was first passed in the Senate on April 23, followed by a federal appeals court that “unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok” on Dec. 6, according to the Associated Press. The bill finally passed through the Supreme Court on Jan. 17.
Gabriela Martinez ’28, who has used TikTok prior to its merger with social media service Musical.ly in 2018 following the latter’s acquisition by ByteDance the previous year, agreed that TikTok is “not one of” the things that “we should be worried about,” although she acknowledged the potential dangers behind using the platform.
“I don’t think banning TikTok should be their priority,” Martinez said. “But I guess I do see how … [TikTok] pushes kids to do dangerous things.”
For example, Martinez said certain trends circulating on TikTok — such as a recent one based on the popular game “Subway Surfers” — have caused accidental deaths.
“There was a trend on TikTok where you jump trains, and kids have died in New York,” Martinez said. “So I guess I can see why it’s dangerous to people.”
In an email statement to The Dartmouth, government professor Brendan Nyhan wrote that the scale of TikTok and a “lack of transparency in how the algorithm works” — combined with its ownership by a “foreign adversary” — makes the platform a “concern” to national security.
“We’ve had foreign-owned media before, but we knew what they were publishing or broadcasting, and they had small audiences,” Nyhan wrote. “TikTok presents a new dilemma.”
Bruschi agreed, adding that the information collected by TikTok could theoretically be used by China to “survey U.S. service members and national security officials,” although TikTok’s privacy policy outlines that they will not share information with the Chinese government, according to the platform’s FAQ.
“As a navy veteran myself, I saw this personally when the Chinese government hacked out some person on management, and it stole highly-sensitive [data from a] personnel questionnaire the intelligence officers completed for security clearances back in 2015,” Bruschi said. “Those forms list everything from your past romantic partners to illegal drug use to all of the addresses where you live.”
Wydler noted that the algorithm TikTok uses to provide personalized content for users could lead to internet echo chambers.
“It seems like people feel like the algorithm knows who they are as a person,” Wydler said. “And say they see a video that is especially cultivated for them … then I think there’s a little bit of an echo chamber in that.”
Wyler said that although “people would be upset” if TikTok failed to find a buyer and went permanently dark in the United States, they would eventually “get over it.”
“Everyone spends a lot of time on TikTok, so if it was just gone, it would be a big hole in people’s thoughts,” Wyler said. “I think there’s a lot of people who really feel like they’re connected through TikTok, which I don’t know how I feel about, but I think there’s definitely a lot of our culture that has over the recent years, started or really gotten off the ground.”
