After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law Friday requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app’s American assets in order to keep operating in the United States, access to the app was restricted. The forced social media break was short-lived, however, as TikTok access in the U.S. was reinstated a mere 12 hours later.
Shortly after taking office Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days.
The law banning TikTok passed with strong bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle citing national security concerns as a driving factor of support. While a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found roughly half of Americans supported the ban, it has remained unpopular with younger Americans who saw the ban as an infringement on their freedom of expression.
Benjamin Rothove and Courtney Graves, co-presidents of the College Republicans of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Daily Cardinal they support banning the app if ByteDance does not sell it.
“TikTok is a national security threat and banning it is good for America. President Trump was gracious when he gave the company 75 days to get its act together, but if TikTok does not decouple from the CCP in that time, the ban must be enforced,” they said.
So, how did the TikTok ban come to be?
The app’s brief hiatus marked the climax of a years-long effort to ban TikTok access in the U.S. over national security concerns related to its China-based parent company, ByteDance.
While TikTok has been a hot topic of discussion in Washington among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle since the first Trump presidency, March 2024 marked the acceleration of real action against the app with the introduction of a bill to ban TikTok unless ByteDance sells its American assets to a U.S. company.
The law, authored by former Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, cited national security concerns about China’s access to American cell phone data and the potential risks associated with Chinese ownership of what Gallagher said is “becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.”
“TikTok, a major source of news and information in America, is controlled by America’s geopolitical adversary, China,” Gallagher wrote in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed earlier this month, which compared the situation to Russia attempting to buy American news outlets.
Wisconsin lawmakers split on TikTok ban
Of Wisconsin’s eight-member House delegation, only Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore voted against the TikTok ban, citing an impediment on American user’s free speech rights.
Shortly after the TikTok ban went into effect, Pocan wrote in a social media post Sunday that the ban was “Congress and the executive branch at their worst.”
“It’s not about selling the entity. It’s about free speech, which is supposed to be a thing in the U.S.,” Pocan wrote.
On Sunday, in the brief hours during which TikTok was inaccessible, Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman’s Fond Du Lac office was set on fire, the 19-year-old suspect citing the TikTok ban and Grothman’s “yes” vote as a motive in the incident.
“I don’t even know yet [what happened] other than somebody tried to set a fire over TikTok,” Grothman told the Fond Du Lac Reporter Sunday.
In the Senate, the TikTok ban was bundled into a $95 billion foreign aid package with aid to Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Included was aid for Taiwan, which had the measure to force TikTok’s sale.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin voted in favor of the package, while Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson voted against it in opposition to additional funding for Ukraine despite supporting a 2023 ban of TikTok on Wisconsin state devices.
In 2023, Johnson signed onto a letter sent to Gov. Tony Evers, describing TikTok as a “CCP surveillance tool.”
At the unveiling of the bill in 2023, Baldwin said she supported “giving the United States the tools it needs to assess the threat of foreign-owned technology and, where appropriate, take steps to restrict access.”
Gabriella Hartlaub is the former arts editor for The Daily Cardinal. She has also written state politics and campus news. She currently is a summer reporting intern with Raleigh News and Observer. Follow her on Twitter at @gabihartlaub.
