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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 went dark over the weekend, only to return within hours based on Trump’s promise to sign the executive order.
The executive order would delay the effect of the law for 90 days, giving a short-term reprieve to the social media app that is highly popular among students and many educators but also has its critics in the education community. Trump’s expected action was heralded by many TikTok users, who’d been crushed by the Jan. 17 Supreme Court ruling that the law to ban the app would take effect on Jan. 19.
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 people,” said Trump, who had unsuccessfully sought to ban TikTok during his first term. “I guess I have a warm spot for TikTok that I didn’t have originally. Then I went on TikTok, and I won young people.”
The president said he changed his mind about banning the platform “because I got to use it. And remember, TikTok is largely about kids, young kids. If China’s going to get information about young kids, I don’t know. To be honest with you, I think we have bigger problems than that.
There are numerous questions left open by the president’s action, including whether the tech companies that are subject to the federal law’s enforcement mechanism—such as Apple, Google, and Oracle—will take the president’s order to mean they can allow downloads of the app or provide technical upgrades.
And the 90-day extension does not remove the law’s requirement that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance Ltd., sell the app to a U.S. owner. Trump put forth the idea of the U.S. government purchasing 50 percent of TikTok with some other owner or owners acquiring the rest, but that plan was short on details.
“We have 90 days to make that decision, and 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.
TikTok is popular with students and some teachers, but also a source of frustration for educators
Despite its popularity, the platform has prompted big frustrations from many educators and especially principals, who have seen it used by kids to spread dangerous viral challenges, such as vandalizing schools; distract students from learning in school; and contribute to kids’ mental health problems.
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 Glankler taught high school history in Austin, Texas. She is now a full-time content creator on TikTok and other social media sites.
Glankler created her TikTok account, Anti-Social Studies, in 2020, two years after starting a podcast and Instagram account under the same name. She has more than 500,000 followers and uses the platform to discuss how she approaches different lessons in her classroom, while also providing history lessons for the general public.
“For me, [TikTok] has led to almost every connection that I have in the world of education and history,” Glankler said.
Trump’s promise of an executive order puts TikTok back in play for people like Glankler and the 170 million Americans who use the platform.
But it still remains unclear what will happen if the executive order expires and TikTok remains owned by a Chinese company.
Jeff Carpenter, a professor of education at Elon University who studies social media in education, said the typical educator’s use of TikTok “has been relatively less social, compared to some of the other platforms where networks, communities, and relationships are a bit more important,” according to his 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 rationale behind the federal law is twofold: First, China, which exerts control over ByteDance and its algorithm for feeding videos to TikTok users, is capable of covertly manipulating content on TikTok to undermine U.S. democracy. Second, it can use the app to gather users’ sensitive personal data.
Court cites data-collection concerns
During the Jan. 10 Supreme Court arguments in the challenge to the law, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh cited the data-collection concerns.
“I think Congress and the president were concerned that China was accessing information about millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, including teenagers, people in their 20s, that they would use that information over time to develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people—people who, a generation from now, will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department,” Kavanaugh said.
The court’s unsigned opinion reflects both the urgent posture of the case and the uncertainties of evolving internet technologies.
“We are conscious that the cases before us involve new technologies with transformative capabilities,” the court said. “This challenging new context counsels caution on our part.”
The court determined that the law, officially the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, is content-neutral and its challenged provisions satisfy an intermediate level of First Amendment scrutiny.
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.