Philip Elliott
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a tech tool owned by a foreign adversary is thrusting its tentacles into the devices in tens of millions of Americans’ pockets, giving its owners the chance to harvest vast amounts of data about them while shaping how they interpret the world around them, either real or imagined. Pretty bold, huh?
That was, in essence, why the U.S. Supreme Court just this month unanimously upheld a law effectively banning TikTok—because Congress saw it as a national security risk that stood to benefit China. Given the challenges coming from Beijing, justices said Washington was within its power to deny it one of its strongest toeholds out of concern that it could be used to surveil Americans, steal their secrets, and feed them a stream of propaganda useful to China’s big-picture goals. (For its part, the China-based parent company ByteDance has rejected U.S. fears about nefarious uses for its TikTok.) So Congress told tech companies like Apple and Google they would run afoul of U.S. law if they kept providing Americans’ access to the app and its updates if TikTok remained under Chinese ownership.
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