Goodbye, TikTok
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the ban on TikTok passed by Congress and signed by President Biden

According to nine-out-of-nine Supreme Court Justices, the United States government is granted the power under the United States Constitution to block access to “foreign adversary controlled applications.” This applies to TikTok in that the parent company of TikTok, Inc. is ByteDance, Ltd., which is a Chinese-owned company which must, by Chinese law, give any information it collects to the Chinese government. This has led to the U.S. government declaring TikTok a “foreign adversary controlled application” under the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which means that it will be unlawful for TikTok to operate in the United States on January 19, 2025 unless ByteDance divests itself from TikTok before that time, or Congress or the incoming Trump regime grants a reprieve.
As an aside, this ban on TikTok operating in the United States does not mean that the United States government is banning itself from using TikTok to spread American propaganda abroad, as journalist Ken Klippenstein reports.
The looming ban on TikTok will not apply to certain U.S. State Department employees responsible for “public diplomacy,” according to an internal cable signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that I obtained. According to the document, the Biden administration has quietly exempted these personnel from the ban “regardless of any potential failure of TikTok to be divested of its foreign PRC [People’s Republic of China] ownership.” Here’s why that’s ironic.
Public diplomacy refers to U.S. State Department messaging (i.e., propaganda) targeted at foreign audiences to “promote U.S. interests abroad,” as the Department puts it. In other words, while the Biden administration is trying to ban Chinese-owned TikTok over concerns about foreign influence operations, the White House is quietly working to use TikTok for its own foreign influence activities. This is just one of a bundle of contradictions in the administration’s attempt to ban the app, not the least of which includes the fact that both the Biden and Harris campaigns aggressively used TikTok last year to reach millions of voters.
The case was brought to the Supreme Court with the argument that banning TikTok is a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In short, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Seems fairly straightforward, and hard to argue with the absolute injunction of “Congress shall make no law…” without qualification. Here’s what the Supreme Court finds, to the contrary:
The challenged provisions further an important Government interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression and do not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further that interest.
The Act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adversary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This objective qualifies as an important Government interest under intermediate scrutiny.
So “Congress shall make no law…” means “Congress shall not substantially burden more speech than necessary,” according to the Court.
So because the U.S. government did not state that restricting speech was an aim of the law, and because China is a “designated foreign adversary” of the United States government, the TikTok ban is legal. Whether or not Congress states that it is their aim to restrict speech, however, the ban on TikTok is clearly an abridgment of the speech of every American citizen who chooses to use TikTok. That statement, as much as it should go without saying, is the lesser argument in the unconstitutionality of the U.S. government banning TikTok in my opinion, however. Far more fundamental is the idea that Congress can designate foreign governments the U.S. is not at war with as “foreign adversaries,” and then use that as a pretext to restrict the liberties of Americans.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
As the Tenth Amendment, quoted above, makes clear, any power not explicitly granted to the United States government in the Constitution is not a legitimate power of the U.S. government. The Constitution does grant Congress the power to declare war on foreign governments in Article 1, Section 8, but the power to designate foreign governments as “foreign adversaries” as a classification separate from a declaration of war is not given anywhere in the document. Therefore, declaring that China is a foreign adversary in the absence of a declaration of war is unconstitutional, and banning TikTok on the basis that China is a foreign adversary is unconstitutional. Unless the U.S. government declares war on China, China cannot be designated a foreign adversary in any constitutional or legal sense, and TikTok cannot constitutionally or legally be banned.
This argument would likely find even less sway with the justices of the Supreme Court than the argument that banning TikTok is a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, however. The Supreme Court does not concern itself with what the Constitution says but with its own navel-gazing precedent, what it hilariously and cynically refers to as “constitutional law.” The obvious fact of the matter is that the U.S. government has no constitutional power to block any app from operating for any reason, absent, perhaps, a declaration of war against a foreign government that controls such an app. Unfortunately more obvious is the fact that it does not matter what the Constitution says, as the United States government is restricted in its application of power only by its imagination and mercy.