Jacob Gershman on the sell-or-ban TikTok law

The litigants have asked the D.C. Circuit to rule by Dec. 6 so there is enough time for the Supreme Court to potentially review the case before the law takes effect. 

The law doesn’t make it a crime to use TikTok, but it does prohibit mobile app stores from letting users download or update it. 

The sell-or-ban law gained bipartisan support after lawmakers received warnings from the intelligence community about China’s ability to exploit the app used by some 170 million Americans, roughly half of the population. ByteDance has said it can’t and won’t sell its U.S. operations by the deadline. The Chinese government has also signaled that it won’t allow a forced sale of TikTok to go through. 

Much of the government’s evidence is classified and shielded not just from the public but from TikTok’s lawyers. They said in court papers that the U.S. government hasn’t shown them any evidence that China has manipulated the content that Americans see on TikTok or that China has accessed U.S. user data.

The U.S. government has shown the judges statements from senior intelligence officials about the dangers posed by TikTok and a transcript of a classified House committee hearing from March that fueled the legislation’s passage. Publicly viewable portions of the filings intimate that the government’s national-security concerns are more than hypothetical. 

Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, wrote in a heavily redacted filing that TikTok’s parent company has a “demonstrated history of manipulating the content on their platforms, including at the direction of the PRC [People’s Republic of China].”

TikTok says it has spent $2 billion walling off U.S. user data on Oracle-owned U.S.-based servers—measures that the U.S. government says fail to adequately insulate TikTok from Chinese influence or prevent user data from being accessed by ByteDance employees located in China. 

~ Jacob Gershman, "Court Appears Skeptical of TikTok’s Challenge to U.S. Ban: Judges are considering the validity of legislation that could shut down Chinese-backed app used by half of Americans," The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2024

Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, in Washington in March