Social media like TikTok today interconnect active speakers and active viewers in all directions. The system monitors and stores all the communications, extracting volumes of data for each individual user.

In China where the law allows it, the government can scan and analyze not only the speakers and viewers but can also retrieve specific facts about all of them. The government can restrict messages based upon speaker, viewer, and content — and use AI to craft and send personalized, tailored messages aiming to influence users’ buying and voting decisions, not to mention their psychological well-being.  

TikTok and the First Amendment

Broad-band internet services, multi-billion-dollar social media, and expanding central government are merging into a muscular octopus of surveillance, data gathering, and direct personal influence upon millions of people worldwide. This octopus is TikTok. The U.S. Congress and the President have acted to weaken the monster, if not destroy it, and so far, their legislation has survived challenges.

On January 17, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (Pub. L. 118-50, div. H), which requires ByteDance, Ltd., to divest itself of TikTok, or else TikTok will go dark, being cut off from U.S. app stores and internet hosting services.

TikTok challenged the Act as unconstitutional, mainly by saying that it violates the First Amendment freedom of speech rights held by TikTok and its users as speakers and recipients of speech. TikTok enables millions of people to communicate, which includes posting information and self-made videos and receiving the same from others. TikTok’s legal counsel cited well-respected legal logic and precedents holding that the government may not prohibit or burden speech just because it doesn’t approve of the speaker(s) or of the content. 

In its TikTok, Inc. v. Garland decision, however, the unanimous Court ruled that the Act does not violate the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its users, emphasizing that the Act aims to address national security risks rather than suppress free speech. TikTok had downplayed the U.S. government’s concerns about national security risks, urging that these concerns were largely speculative.

TikTok also explained that forcing ByteDance to divest itself of the immensely complicated international TikTok system would impose billions of dollars in costs and take a year or more to accomplish. Arguably, the Act would mean the end of TikTok as Americans knew it.

Threat to U.S. National Security

Undisputedly, TikTok has about 170 million monthly users in the U.S. It enables users to create, upload, and watch short video clips enhanced with text, voiceovers, and music. It delivers content to users that is selected by the company’s: (1) recommendation engine; (2) content moderation policies; and (3) decisions about video promotion and filtering.

There’s more to the story, however. Defending the Act’s constitutionality, the U.S. Attorney General, along with various legislators and groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, supplied evidence to the Court showing:

(1) TikTok’s recommendation engine is software that cannot leave China.

(2) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government directly influence ostensibly “private” companies in China like ByteDance and TikTok.

(3) The Chinese government actively seeks to undermine U.S. influence, drive wedges between the U.S. and its allies, surpass the U.S. in national national and international power, and promote values and opinions that favor its authoritarian system.

(4) TikTok collects an extensive range of user data, including users’ age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device details, phone contacts, social network connections, private messages, and videos watched.

(5) Chinese law requires companies to “assist or cooperate” with intelligence activities, giving the governments’ agencies authority to access and control TikTok’s personal data about every American and worldwide user.

(6) The Chinese government can potentially track U.S. government and military employees as well as any others deemed important.

(7) The Chinese government can expand its use of AI-powered propaganda and can potentially feed individually tailored ideological or dis-informational messages and deepfakes to TikTok users rapidly and repeatedly, thus sowing conflict and affecting opinions and voting decisions in the U.S.

Not a Simple “Free Speech” Controversy

With this case, the Supreme Court faced a problem unlike any in its history. The situation that TikTok presents is not similar to mere newspapers, radio, television, electronic mail or ordinary Internet websites. Congress drafted and passed the Act to address an international system that lures unsuspecting users for entertainment by the millions, and gathers enough data to profile all the users. The system then enables corporations or governments to:

• identify and track specific types of people

• control all of the users’ communications

• transmit AI-refined propaganda and disinformation

• persuade or scare any or all users without warnings or disclaimers

Based upon its evidence and China’s status as a “foreign adversary” nation, Congress passed the Act that names TikTok for immediate mitigation of its threats to national security. This can be done by either blocking it from use or disconnecting it from total Chinese government influence. The Supreme Court agreed that the Act does not bar “free speech;” it instead deals with adversary governments that could use such social media as a weapon.

The new administration’s approach

Reportedly, President Trump has a plan to divest TikTok enough to give the U.S. a large percentage of control. That move neglects the fact that TikTok and other media systems like it pose incalculable dangers to humankind because of their immense multi-dimensional matrix of data collection and propaganda transmission powers.

How can an everyday person help thwart the danger of TikTok and similar “entertainment” social media? Don’t use them — don’t visit, click on links, forward content, reply to messages, or buy anything from their vendors. Ever.