Support for a TikTok Ban Is Dwindling
The Supreme Court is expected to announce its ruling on whether to uphold the law that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States on Friday, three days before Donald Trump - a vocal critic of the ban - is sworn in for his second term.
When President Joe Biden signed into law legislation that would force TikTok parent ByteDance to divest the U.S. arm of its popular social media platform in April 2024, the company was given 270 days to comply with the order or be banned from operating in the United States. That deadline expires on Sunday, but despite ByteDance's failure to find a suitable buyer by now, the fate of TikTok in the U.S. from Sunday on is still unclear.
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”, as the law is called, seeks to cut any ties between TikTok, its current parent company and the Chinese government, which allegedly abuses the platform to “surveil and influence the American public” in a way that poses a threat to national security.
In December, the United States Court of Appeals upheld the law, finding that it does not violate the First Amendment. "The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. 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 judges explained their decision. Later that month, president-elect Trump filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, asking to stay the deadline for a TikTok divestiture so that his administration could pursue an alternative solution that would prevent a TikTok ban, while also addressing the national security concerns.
Trump is not alone in his scepticism towards a potential TikTok ban. Support from the American public has also been dwindling. According to two surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in March 2023 and in July/August 2024, the share of U.S. adults supporting the ban dropped from 50 to 32 percent. Interestingly, support could be seen waning on both sides of the aisle, with the share of respondents in support of the ban dropping from 43 to 24 percent among Democrats and from 60 to 42 percent among Republicans. Unsurprisingly, TikTok users are largely opposed to the ban, with just 10 percent of users stating their support.