Tick Tock for TikTok, By James Reed

The communist Chinese site TikTok, is a particularly evil mind virus. While we respect and uphold in general freedom of thought and expression, this site operates to serve as a communist cultural attack upon the youth of the West, with much cultural degeneracy, as well as a national security threat by data gathering for the communists. We have enough of this from Western sites, without communist Chinese surveillance as well.

In the US TikTok has been banned for these reasons, and the US Supreme Court has upheld a constitutional challenge to the ban. Trump though has said he will save the app, which is inconsistent with an American First stance, but many of us have known that this was all for show by this showman. Even the Supreme Court held that "divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok's data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/us/politics/supreme-court-tiktok.html

"A unanimous Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that effectively bans the wildly popular app TikTok in the United States starting on Sunday. The ruling ended, at least for now, a legal battle involving national security, free speech and a cultural phenomenon that had millions of Americans deliriously swiping their phone screens at any given moment.

The ruling, which forces the app to go dark if it remains under Chinese control, could be a death blow to TikTok's American operations. President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is to be inaugurated the following day, has vowed to "save" the app though his mechanisms for doing so remain unclear.

In ruling against TikTok, the court acknowledged the wide-ranging cultural impact of the app while siding with the government's concerns that China's role posed national security concerns.

"There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community," the court's opinion said. "But 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."

TikTok gained a foothold in American culture in 2020 as a pandemic curiosity and swiftly grew into an undeniable juggernaut. It serves up short-form videos that are a leading source of information and entertainment to tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones.

Not only has the app given rise to a new crop of celebrities and fueled chart-topping books, music and movies, but it has also helped shape conversation around the Israel-Hamas war and last year's U.S. presidential election.

Although TikTok's lawyer told the justices last week that the app would "go dark" if it lost the case, it was not clear how quickly a shutdown would happen. At a minimum, app store operators like Apple and Google face significant penalties imposed by the law if they continue to distribute and update the TikTok app.

TikTok challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, saying the government was required to use more modest measures to address its security concerns. For example, the company said, Congress could have barred sending Americans' data abroad and required disclosure of China's role in formulating the app's algorithm.

TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has said that more than half of the company is owned by global institutional investors and that the Chinese government does not have a direct or indirect ownership stake in TikTok or ByteDance.

But ByteDance has headquarters in Beijing and is subject to China's control. The court accepted the U.S. government's argument that the national security concerns justified the law forcing a sale or ban of TikTok.

The decision, delivered on an exceptionally abbreviated schedule, has few rivals in the annals of important First Amendment precedents and in the vast practical impact it will have. But the opinion stressed that some of its conclusions were tentative."