BY EMERSON LAYNE

Over the past few chaotic weeks, the Supreme Court of the United States has looked at the legality of a law that could ban TikTok from the US. Alongside the California wildfires and President Jimmy Carter’s death, the impending Tiktok ban has been making headlines. Many users and advocates of Tiktok have upheld the idea that the Supreme Court justices should change their mind on the ban, on the reasoning that users’ First Amendment rights were being violated. Though the justices seem to be more on the side of banning Tiktok, their stance wasn’t completely certain heading into this final week before the ban goes into effect. However, today the Supreme Court officially upheld the law, and unless Bytedance divests from the company the ban will go into effect on Sunday. 

The notion of banning Tiktok gained traction over the past few years as government officials became apprehensive of Tiktok’s parent company, Bytedance, being based in China. The US government and tech companies expressed worry over a national security risk due to the way China oversees its tech platforms. Opponents to Tiktok say that under China’s rule, Bytedance could feed user data to China or have China influence spread on Tiktok. So, last year the Supreme Court said that if Bytedance sold Tiktok to a US tech company, the Tiktok ban would be overturned. If not, Tiktok would shut down on January 19th, being removed from the app store and Tiktok’s support servers would be shut down. So far, Bytedance hasn’t sold or made any deals with an interested company regarding Tiktok. 

People who disapprove of the ban express that the Supreme Court is taking away free speech from the users of Tiktok, though the Supreme Court justices and other figures express that freedom of speech isn’t the concern over Tiktok. Another concern from people siding with Tiktok is that quite a lot of users have generated enough income through the app to create a livelihood on Tiktok, by promoting their business or making promotion deals with companies. The Supreme Court and other political figures haven’t commented on this. President elect Donald Trump has expressed that the Supreme Court should delay the ban on Tiktok, so when he is inaugurated into office on January 20th, he would make a decision on what should happen with Tiktok. In the past, Trump has stated that Tiktok should be banned, but seemed to later change his opinion on Tiktok during his 2024 election campaign, praising Tiktok for his own popularity on the app. 

Recently, Tiktok users have been transitioning over to another app in protest of the Tiktok ban. A Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu, has lately been flooded with American users, referring to themselves as “Tiktok refugees”. The movement was so large that the app shot to the top of the app store as the most downloaded app in America. So far the interaction between the new American users and Chinese users have been positive and friendly. American users explain why they’re moving to Xiaohongshu and express their interest in Chinese culture. Chinese users respond welcomely, embracing the opportunity for intercultural interaction and communication. Both American and Chinese users alike agree the Tiktok ban due to national security reasons and fear of China is pointless, agreeing the new intercultural interactions on Xiaohongshu is a way of sticking it up to the US government. There’s also a sense that user data concerns fall flat as the United States has consistently failed to implement user data protection regulations even as many other countries, including the EU, have been very aggressive in protecting their population’s data. 

Though the Tiktok ban is imminent, Tiktok users have found ways to show their opposition to it. Through an unexpected route of intercultural interactions on a Chinese social media platform. Now everyone must wait and see if any sort of hail mary sale happens over the weekend.