The TikTok Ban Won’t Help

The TikTok ban is about US tech hegemony, not national security or protecting Americans’ data, which homegrown social media companies make a business of collecting and selling.

Chinese Ownership Of TikTok Under Scrutiny Of U.S. Lawmakers, As Congress To Vote On Bill To Force Sale Of The Social Media App

A Supreme Court ruling has set the stage for TikTok to potentially go offline as soon as Sunday. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)


After today’s Supreme Court ruling, TikTok is set to be banned in the United States on Sunday following the refusal of its parent Chinese company, ByteDance, to sell the social media app to a US company.

In a digital landscape dominated by social media apps owned and curated by US companies, TikTok is the most successful app to have come out of China. It has over 170 million American users — most of the US population — largely young people, and also a significant number of businesses that use the app to advertise their wares.

Whether the ban will actually occur remains anyone’s guess. Joe Biden has said that his administration doesn’t plan to implement it during its last days in the White House, and Donald Trump, who had originally tried to ban the app during his first term, later vowed to save it (after accumulating some fourteen million followers on the platform).

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