The TikTok ban lands at the Supreme Court on Friday. Turns out ByteDance is far from the only Chinese company in the US government’s crosshairs. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Travis Larchuk, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Illustration of President Donald Trump expressing support for TikTok in Shanghai, China. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to the TikTok ban discussion?
The first time we covered a potential TikTok ban on Today Explained was way back in August of 2020, when the president at the time said he wanted to ban it.
For a while now, there's been this kind of floating concern in national security circles that is something going on with TikTok that the government should be worried about. But Trump has really escalated the attacks on TikTok.
The next time was in February of 2023 when Congress was humoring a ban. You could kind of just throw a dart in the congressional halls and probably hit some member that wants it banned. Then again in March of last year when Congress passed the ban.
This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It's an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe. A winner.
And then again again in April when said ban was signed into law.
This is consequential.
Now the TikTok ban is heading to the Supreme Court of the United States. I'm Sean Ramos from Get Ready With Me on Today Explained.
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Chapter 2: How does the TikTok ban relate to national security?
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Today explained here with Vox's senior TikTok correspondent. No, sorry. He covers the Supreme Court. Ian Millhiser, the U.S. government passed a law requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the company to someone who's perhaps not controlled by the Chinese government. But now, this very week, the Supreme Court is is entering the chat. How come? Right.
So there's a First Amendment challenge here.
So what this law does is it says TikTok has to be owned by someone else. It can't be owned by ByteDance, which is a Beijing company, if TikTok wants to continue to operate in the United States. And there's a First Amendment challenge to this. There's actually two separate First Amendment challenges.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Supreme Court's involvement?
One is brought by TikTok, and TikTok is saying essentially that they have a First Amendment right to continue to operate regardless of who their owner is. And then there's another challenge brought by TikTok users, influencers, you know, people who just want to be able to use TikTok and to publish on it. And they claim that they have a First Amendment right to continue using this platform.
Seven other creators, as well as myself, have filed a lawsuit against the federal government in their attempt to strip us of our First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
I'm going to the Supreme Court. Me being there is just a representation of all of the women who found their dream here, their financial independence here.
So there's two conflicting principles here. I mean, normally the government cannot tell media companies who their owner has to be, and for obvious reasons. If the government could do that, they could just make all the newspapers sell themselves to Trump supporters, and then we wouldn't have a free press anymore. We'd just have propaganda. But...
There is a long, long, long standing rule going back at least to the Radio Act of 1912, and it prevented foreign nationals, foreign companies from getting licensed to operate a radio station in the United States. And there's still a similar prohibition in effect right now. So right now, if you are a foreign national, a foreign company,
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Chapter 4: Who is challenging the TikTok ban and why?
Even a company with a certain amount of foreign ownership, you are not allowed to get a license to broadcast on the radio in the United States. So this is very, very well established when it comes to that sort of key communications infrastructure. The federal government has long had the power to say Americans only.
TikTok does try to argue that the rule governing foreign ownership of media should not apply to TikTok because they say that rule is just about allocating limited bandwidth. There can only be but so many TV stations. And so given that you were dealing with a limited resource, it made sense for the government to make choices about who could and could not own it.
So that's one of TikTok's arguments. I don't think that's a particularly persuasive argument. And the reason why is that the reason we don't let foreign nationals control radio stations is national security. You don't want a foreign government, potentially a foreign adversary, to be able to broadcast propaganda.
So who's going to be making that argument for TikTok in front of the Supreme Court on Friday? TikTok has hired Noel Francisco, who is a former solicitor general, used to be Trump's solicitor general. Huh.
And it's funny you mention Donald Trump, once and future president, formerly a fan of a TikTok ban, but now coming back around and asking the government to pump the brakes, yeah?
Yeah. So as a first-term president, Donald Trump tried to essentially ban TikTok, do the same thing that this law does, just do it using executive authority.
We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. It can't be controlled for security reasons by China. Too big, too invasive.
And the court said, no, you can't do that. You need an act of Congress if you're going to ban it. And so Congress actually did pass that law under the Biden administration. So it used to be that Trump and Biden agreed on this. The law that passed Congress had overwhelming bipartisan support. And Trump rather recently seems to have flipped his position.
Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.
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Chapter 5: What factors are influencing the ownership of TikTok?
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Today Explained is back. Ian Millhiser is gone because he just covers the Supreme Court. We want to talk about more of the technology, national security side of this story. So we reached out to Heather Somerville from The Wall Street Journal, who happens to cover national security issues. And technology. Heather, is TikTok the only Chinese entity that the U.S.
government wants to ban, or are there others? I know we don't have electric vehicles from China, but what else is going on on the national security side?
Yeah, TikTok is far from the only one that policymakers and regulators are targeting. There's a slew of proposals out there, some more formal than others, by members of Congress and by regulators. to prohibit or at least reduce the sale of Chinese technologies in the United States.
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Chapter 6: How might the Supreme Court's decision impact the First Amendment?
We are talking about the Uyghurs. That's exactly right.
The US Treasury Department specifically singled out DJI for providing drones to the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, which American authorities allege are being used for the surveillance of Uighur Muslims in the region.
And there's purportedly classified information that Sandia National Labs uncovered about security risks posed by DJI drones. There have been certain security experts that have done teardowns on DJI drones that have shown that they can and do send information back to Beijing. Now, there's lots of counter arguments to these concerns.
People who use DJI drones say they can fly them without connecting them to the internet. They use American software on the drones. They keep all the data stored locally. Similar arguments are around Chinese LiDAR. They say the LiDAR aren't connected to the internet. How is the data going back to Beijing? So there is quite a bit of pushback to some of these national security concerns from
members of the public who like to use these products.
If the abilities of the drones and the capabilities of the drones take four or five steps backwards and the price goes up, that's terrible for the American people and let alone our local community members here.
And yet, none of that has swayed the U.S. government. The U.S. government is very much marching in the direction of eliminating these sorts of Chinese technologies from the American marketplace.
Okay, but still there, we're talking about what they could do. It feels a little more on this side of paranoia, boogeyman, than look what they are doing. Is that fair?
I think it's fair to say that a lot of this is preemptive for fear of what China could and would do, particularly in the case where the U.S. finds itself in a conflict with China over Taiwan. But getting back to some of the supply chain and market dominance concerns, which are also in a way a national security threat, if you think about the economic vulnerability there the United States has,
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Chapter 7: What is the broader context of U.S. bans on Chinese companies?
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