From Civil Liberties to National Security: TikTok Debate and Beyond
- Colin Sun
- 23 hours ago
- 6 min read
On January 17, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law requiring TikTok to shut down in the United States unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sold off the app by January 19. The app briefly went dark —briefly. Less than a day later, the app returned after incoming President Donald Trump pledged not to enforce the law while TikTok worked with China and America to find a permanent solution. This ongoing saga underscores the challenge of balancing national security, civil liberties, and competition with China.
Both the federal law banning TikTok and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold it are unprecedented. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Protect Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) into law. The legislation was designed to protect the data of American citizens from foreign entities, especially those from “countries of concern.” This law required TikTok to transfer ownership to an American entity. If ByteDance failed to comply, the app would be officially banned in the U.S.
The passage of this law is important for two reasons. First, it marked the first time in American history that a social media app was censored. Second, 79 senators voted in favor of the law. Such overwhelming bipartisan support is rare in an increasingly divided America. Concerns about the national security threat posed by a Chinese social media app united a bitterly divided U.S. legislature.
However, the legal ban is controversial for multiple reasons. The first is its tension with the First Amendment of the Constitution, which protects people’s right to free speech. If enforced, the ban would remove a platform used by 170 million Americans to create content and, in doing so, exercise their constitutional rights. To address this tension, the Supreme Court argued that the ban did not take away free speech but targeted the platform due to its national security risks. In other words, it focused on ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, not its numerous followers. Concerns about national security and data privacy outweighed users’ right to use this specific platform. The Court noted that alternative platforms remained available for users to exercise their First Amendment rights.
In response, many TikTok users argued that they had built their livelihoods on TikTok. They contended that it was false to assume alternative platforms would offer the same opportunities as TikTok and that the “de-platforming” effectively took away their constitutional rights in practice.
The third reason for the ban’s controversy lies in its nature as both a domestic and international issue. Under the principle of sovereignty, the U.S. court system has absolute jurisdiction over issues like how to handle a foreign company’s operations within the United States. However, the shadow of great power rivalry looms large. Ultimately, national security concerns prevailed over keeping people’s right to free speech on this Chinese-owned platform. President Trump, who promoted the idea of banning TikTok during his first term, had a change of heart. He admitted that he has a “sweet spot for TikTok” and signed an executive order allowing TikTok to continue its operation for 75 days. Meanwhile, he reached out to his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, to negotiate a long-term solution. This development shows that the wall separating domestic and foreign issues is porous, despite sovereignty’s absolutist definition of a government’s “exclusive” right to rule. It also invites the question of whether TikTok, with its 170 million American users, has become “too big to fail.” Even some Democratic lawmakers have admitted that a solution must be found to allow such a vast number of Americans to continue their livelihoods on TikTok.
Finally, the TikTok saga should be placed in a broader context. In recent years, several states passed laws restricting property ownership by Chinese nationals and entities on national security grounds. For example, the Florida legislature passed SB264, prohibiting Chinese nationals without US citizenship or permanent residency from purchasing property in the state; another law, SB 846, restricts public universities in Florida from entering into agreements with nationals and organizations from countries like China, effectively banning employment opportunities for Chinese students and scholars. Although both laws identify not just China but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea as “foreign countries of concern”, the laws have a disproportionate impact on Chinese immigrants, given China’s much bigger economic influence. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not hide his intent: he made clear these laws were crafted to curb “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state.”
Several states have enacted laws like Florida’s – the list includes Texas, Virginia, Indiana, Louisiana, Utah, among others. These states have passed laws to limit property ownership by foreign nationals, especially those from countries seen as foreign adversaries. All cited national security and economic concerns.
Though not entirely similar in content to the TikTok ban, these laws collectively reveal the tricky balance between protecting freedom (both political and commercial) on one hand and safeguarding national security amid geopolitical tensions on the other. Both the state-level legislatures restricting nationals from adversarial powers to purchase property and the ban on TikTok require governments to draw on cases from the 19th century to justify their decisions. This could be problematic, as America today is significantly different from America in the late 19th century. “Waking up” those old cases would not only provide legal precedent but also risk rekindling anti-foreigner sentiment.
Laws that limit property ownership and education access have economic and racial consequences. In Florida, about 2,500 Chinese students attend the state’s three largest public universities, making up around 30% of international students at schools like the University of Florida and Florida State. Restrictions like SB 846 could sharply reduce enrollment, impacting schools that rely on tuition. Similarly, banning Chinese citizens from buying property is discriminatory, echoing past injustices. In the early 20th century, the Californian state legislature passed the “California Alian Land Law of 1913”, also known as “Webb-Haney Act”, that barred Japanese nationals from owning land . This law paved the way for the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II under questionable national security claims. The law remained in effect until 1948, when the Supreme Court invalidated it in Oyama v. California (1948) and Takahashi v. Fish and Game Commission (1948).
Just like the on-again, off-again debate on TikTok, the Trump administration is also imposing and pausing tariffs on America’s top three trading partners—Canada, China, and Mexico. However, much like the TikTok controversy and state legislatures denying contract freedom based on citizenship, the tariff war is driven more by politics than by economics, ultimately making such blanket punishment a lose-lose situation for everyone.
In short, the debate over TikTok and related laws targeting Chinese nationals reveals a growing pattern: the U.S. is increasingly willing to sacrifice constitutional rights in the name of national security. But when that trade-off begins to affect people’s livelihoods, freedom of speech, or access to education and housing, we have to ask—who gets to define security, and at what cost?
Many immigrants—both documented and undocumented—face sweeping crackdowns that raise serious constitutional questions. We have seen photos of men being pressed with their heads down into the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador—all for a fee the Trump Administration is paying out to its dictatorial president, Bukele. We have also heard of a Maryland man being wrongly deported to this prison, still facing a long legal battle to be returned. We have read news stories of students and scholars with their visas revoked—not for crimes, but for political speech and actions deemed anti-Semitic.
Here in Colorado, ICE agents arrested longtime immigrant rights advocate Jeanette Vizguerra, telling her in the parking lot of the Target where she was working, “We finally got you.” So—nationwide and here locally—we are not having abstract legal debates. We are witnessing deeply personal tragedies unfolding in our neighborhoods.
Local actions matter: for example, we can help distribute “Know Your Rights” brochures to vulnerable communities like undocumented immigrants or international students and scholars. We can advocate for school boards, places of worship, and libraries to push back on surveillance policies targeting immigrants. By fighting a national cause locally, we make the values we defend real.
Colin Sun is a student at Rock Canyon High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Colin comes from an immigrant family and is interested in reading about history and politics and volunteering to help people with disabilities. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking.