TikTok’s fate in the U.S. hangs in the balance as the Supreme Court weighs in on a proposed ban of the popular social media platform.
The TikTok ban made its way through the U.S. House and Senate early last year, tucked into an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and was signed into law in April by President Joe Biden. Now the decision lays at the feet of the nine Supreme Court justices in the U.S., as they consider arguments on Friday. That renewed scrutiny on TikTok in Canada after the social media app was removed from government-issued devices nearly two years ago.
Despite those national security concerns, nearly 76 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 24 were on TikTok, according to a 2022 survey from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab. But another survey, from a Leger poll in March 2024, found that half of Canadians support the TikTok ban down south, with an increasing number of Canadians expressing concerns about their data security.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking shortly after the TikTok ban became law, said he would not comment on the U.S. bill but added that “Canada will continue to look very closely at how we can make sure we’re keeping Canadians safe, while making sure we’re taking advantage of great technologies that spur innovation and opportunities for people right across the country.”
“We know that the security, the privacy and the data protection of Canadians needs to be a first priority for us,” Trudeau added.
The government later ordered TikTok’s Canadian operations to be shut down, which the company is currently challenging in court. That order would not block Canadians’ access to the TikTok app.
With widespread use among young Canadians, how would a ban in the U.S. affect users up north? And could Canada follow suit with its own ban?
Is the U.S. banning TikTok?
The timing of the TikTok ban has neatly coincided with president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, leaving the ban up in the air.
The TikTok bill threatened a ban in an effort to force the sale of the social media platform from the company’s China-based parent, ByteDance, setting a nine-month deadline for ByteDance to sell the company, with the possibility of a three-month extension if a sale is in progress.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has said it won’t sell the short-form video platform. But some investors have been eyeing it, including Trump’s former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, billionaire businessman Frank McCourt and Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary.
On Thursday, McCourt and O’Leary’s Project Liberty initiative said it, along with its unnamed partners, presented a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets.
If TikTok isn’t sold to an approved buyer, the federal law would prohibit app stores, such as those operated by Apple and Google, from offering the popular app. It would also bar internet hosting services from hosting TikTok.
TikTok, in April, said it would wage a legal challenge against what it called an “unconstitutional” effort by Congress.
“We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
American lawmakers claim that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese government and could be forced to provide user data to the government at any time in accordance with China’s National Intelligence Law.
However, the U.S. government hasn’t provided any evidence to back its claims, and TikTok has long denied that it has, or would ever, share user data with Chinese government.
TikTok’s CEO was grilled at a U.S. congressional committee nearly a two years ago over national security concerns. Shou Zi Chew told the committee that TikTok’s headquarters are in Los Angeles and in Singapore, with 7,000 employees in the U.S. and that TikTok is not available in China.
The ban’s fate grew more complicated as Trump weighed in, voicing his opposition in a court filing, arguing that he could secure a “political resolution” after his inauguration on Jan. 20, the day after the ban is set to go into effect.
How would a U.S. TikTok ban work?
Divestiture, the forced sale of TikTok being proposed in the U.S., is usually a method of breaking up monopolies under competition and antitrust law, Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in a Digital Society, said, but that’s not the case with TikTok.
Bednar explained that the fear of TikTok having to hand over its data is real, but that the conversation should instead be focused on cybersecurity and privacy policy.
The proposed ban sets a precedent for governments, Philip Mai — co-director of TMU’s Social Media Lab — warned, setting up the ability for future presidents to ban or force the sale of social media platforms by citing national security concerns.
Even if a ban were to go through in the U.S., Mai said, it could be battled in court for years.
“This is probably going to be litigated for years to come,” he added. “It’s going to buy a lot of new mansions for a lot of lawyers in Washington, D.C. for the next few years.”
Canada deletes TikTok from government-issued devices
The same national security concerns cited in the U.S. sparked a widespread ban of TikTok from federal and provincial government-issued phones, with Premier Doug Ford going even further, ordering all of his Ontario PC caucus members to remove the application from their personal mobile devices in March 2023.
The Canadian Press reported on March 14 that the federal government had ordered a national security review of the social media app, though Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne later said parents shouldn’t be concerned about their children using TikTok.
But even the government hasn’t cut its TikTok ties completely. Bednar pointed out that the government continued to spend over a million dollars on advertisements in 2022 to 2023 on a social media platform it had wiped from government devices.
Will Canada ban TikTok?
There’s not much appetite in Canada for a widespread ban on TikTok, Mai said, especially as influencers in Canada rely on the popular social media platform for viewership.
If the U.S. were to pass its TikTok ban, Canada is likely to follow suit, Bednar added.
“We’re definitely a follower country,” she said, “And I think it would be difficult for us to rationalize why we’re not following suit when our, when our American neighbour is taking a particular stance.”
But even a Canadian TikTok ban wouldn’t solve the issue of how companies handle, or mishandle, our data, Bednar said, and no major social media platform has ever been completely transparent about who has access to user data.
Even social media platforms that seem innocuous can have “secret vulnerabilities,” she explained, giving the example of how Strava, a fitness app that helps runners track and share their routes, accidentally revealed the location of U.S. military bases in Syria.
The implication of a ban could be that TikTok users are somehow putting Canada’s national security at risk, Bednar added, but data security is a bigger, and separate, issue.
“Really there’s just this problem with privacy and information and who it’s being shared with,” she said.
“Other than the connection to the Chinese government, American social media apps behave in very similar ways when it comes to how greedy they are with data.”
