President Trump signed an executive order delaying the effect of a federal law that effectively bans TikTok unless it is divested by its China-controlled owner, leaving many educators and students who use the social media site wondering what happens next.
Tiktok has darkened the weekend, just to return in a few hours, depending on Trump’s promise to point out the decree.
On Jan. 20, hours after being sworn in for his second term, Trump signed the order in the Oval Office and suggested in remarks to reporters that he was perhaps not as worried about national security concerns as the law’s supporters in Congress.
“Tiktok is largely young,” said Trump, who had not been successful in banning Tiktok from his first term. “I think I have a warm position for Tiktok that it wasn’t originally. Then I went to Tiktok and won over the young people. »»
The president said he replaced his brain for prohibiting the platform “because I can use it. And remember, Tiktok is largely on children, young children. If China receives data on young children, I don’t know. To be fair with you, I think we have Greater disorders than that.
There are many open questions through the president’s action, especially if the technological corporations that are an issue for the mechanism to apply federal law, such as Apple, Google and Oracle, will take the president’s order so that they can allow application discharges or supply. Technical updates.
And the extension of at least 75 days does not remove the law’s requirement that Tiktok’s owner, Bytedance Ltd. , will have to sell the application to a U. S. correctional service provider. Trump highlighted the concept of the United States. The government bought 50% of Tiktok and other owners earn the rest, but this plan lacked details.
“I could see making a deal where the U.S. gets 50 percent of TikTok,” Trump said in his Oval Office conversation with reporters. “I’ll tell you what. Every rich person has called me about [a deal for] TikTok.”
Still, the Jan. 17 ruling by the Supreme Court angered educators who use the social media site to share ideas, learn new teaching skills, and even earn income as TikTok influencers.
Until this school year, Emily Grankler taught the history of the school in Austin, Texas. She is now a complete content author on Tiktok and other social media sites.
“For me, [Tiktok] has led to almost all the connections I have in the global schooling and history,” Glankler said.
Trump’s executive order puts Tiktok at stake, for now, for other people such as Glankler and the 170 million Americans who use the platform.
But it is not yet transparent what will be if the decree expires and Tiktok remains detained through a Chinese company.
Jeff Carpenter, a professor of schooling at Elon University who studies social media in schooling, said that the typical educator use of Tiktok “has been less social, compared to some of the other platforms where networks, communities and relationships are a little bit more important. , “According to their research.
If a ban on TikTok is put back in place, Carpenter said for a majority of educators, it will most likely be “more about losing a source of content and information related to education than it will be about a sense of losing relationships, networks, or communities,” Carpenter said. “Because there are other platforms that can serve as information sources, I think plenty of educators will shrug, feel a little wistful, and move on to another app or platform.”
The justification of the federal law is double: first, China, that bya’s training and its set of rules to feed videos to Tiktok users, is able to secretly manipulate the Tiktok content to undermine US democracy. Second, you can use the application to collect non -public knowledge of users.
During the arguments of the Supreme Court of January 10 in the law dispute, Brett issued a ruling over Mr. Kavanaugh cited the disorders of knowledge collection.
“I think Congress and the President feared that China would access data on millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, adding teenagers, other people in their twenties, who would use this data over time to expand spies, to other people, to blackmail, other people who, as of now, paint in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department,” Kavanaugh said.
The court’s unsigned opinion reflects the pressing stance of the case and the uncertainties of the evolution of internet technologies.
“We are aware that the matters that are seized with us involve new technologies with transformative capabilities,” the court said. “This new complicated context advises caution on our part. “
The court decided that the law, officially the US coverage of the foreign adversary applications law, is impartial in content and that its contested provisions satisfy an intermediate point of control of the first amendment.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch concurred only in the outcome of the case, but did not agree with all of its First Amendment conclusions. He said: “I harbor serious reservations about whether the law before us is content neutral and thus escapes strict scrutiny,” or the highest level of constitutional analysis.
The court said the law was justified by the federal government’s concern about preventing China from collecting “vast amounts” of data from TikTok’s users in the United States.