Tech Tips

• Year: 2025
• Citation: Vol. 48 No. 1 Pg. 46
• Pages: 46

Tech Tips No. Vol. 48 No. 1 Pg. 46 Wyoming Bar Journal February, 2025

Blake A. Klinkner

What's the Big Deal About TikTok? Inside the United States Supreme Court's Decision to Uphold a Federal Ban on One of the World's Most Popular Social Media Platforms

On January 17,2025, the United States Supreme Court upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which will make it unlawful for companies in the United States to distribute, maintain, or update one of the worlds most popular social media platforms, the video sharing site TikTok, starting on January 19th of this year.^[1] TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to create, publish, view,

Although the Court's opinion in TikTok v. Garland has answered the major question of whether it is constitutional to require TikTok's qualified divestiture to avoid a nationwide ban, the opinion has left the door open to several important questions.

share, and interact with short videos, which may be overlaid with text and audio. Following Tik-Tok's launch in 2017, TikTok has attained over 170 million users in the United States, and worldwide TikTok has more than one billion users.^[2] In 2023 alone, TikTok users in the United States uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos which were viewed more than 13 trillion times around the world.^[3] Why did the United States decide to ban TikTok, and why is the Supreme Courts decision such a big deal?

Blake Klinkner is a professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

TikTok is owned and controlled by Byte-Dance Ltd., a company with operations in China. ByteDance Ltd. is subject to Chinese law, which requires ByteDance Ltd. to "assist or cooperate" with the Chinese government's "intelligence work."^[4] Chinese law further provides that the Chinese government has "the power to access and control private data" that TikTok may obtain.^[5]As TikTok's popularity skyrocketed in the United States, American national security officials became increasingly concerned that TikTok could be used by China to spy on Americans and harvest vast amounts of information on American citizens, businesses, and other interests. The information that TikTok obtains from its American users, which could be provided to the Chinese government according to Chinese law, includes: user age, user phone numbers, GPS coordinates showing the user's precise locations, user calendar information, internet addresses viewed by users, information about the phones or other devices owned by a user, phone contacts, social network connections, lists of videos watched by the user, the contents of private messages, keystroke patterns and rhythms, and other behavioral and network data.^[6]

In August 2020, President Trump issued Executive Order Number 13942, titled "Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok, and Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain," which advised that "the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed...