The Supreme Court’s decision to back President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban the Chinese social media app TikTok may have inadvertently handed the Trump administration “power that the Constitution puts off limits,” two columnists argued Monday.
“We could have avoided this ending if the court had not bungled the beginning,” wrote columnists Evelyn Douek and Jameel Jaffer in an op-ed published in the Guardian Monday.
“If the court had carefully scrutinized the government’s national security arguments, it would have seen that the TikTok ban, for all of its novelty, is actually just a familiar example of the government exploiting the rhetoric of national security to intimidate courts into giving it power that the constitution puts off limits.”
Trump and members of Congress pushed during his first term to ban the platform under the guise of national security, arguing that the Chinese government was actively collecting data on Americans using the app. However, many lawmakers, political figures and tech industry leaders have also cited their disdain for TikTok exposing young Americans to videos of Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza, warning that it was “undercutting support for Israel among young Americans.”
Since 2024, Trump has reversed his position and has worked to prevent a ban.
The Supreme Court ultimately accepted the argument that TikTok posed a national security threat, a decision that came as a disappointment to critics who say the ruling was a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Douek and Jaffer consider themselves among that group.
“The court would have understood that the ban itself created a serious national security risk – the kind of risk the modern First Amendment was intended to prevent – by giving the government far-reaching influence over public discourse online,” they wrote.
“Over the coming months, the Supreme Court will confront other cases in which the government says that national security requires the suppression of speech. The court’s analysis of those cases should be haunted by the TikTok case and its embarrassing, scandalous coda.”
Now, the Trump administration appears to be brokering a deal for Oracle Corporation – founded by Trump-ally, tech billionaire and staunch Israel supporter Larry Ellison – to take a majority stake in TikTok U.S. Furthermore, censorship of content related to Israel has already seen an uptick on the platform in recent weeks.
Trump first floated banning TikTok near the end of his first term in 2020, but was ultimately blocked by the courts from doing so. Former President Joe Biden signed a bill into law in 2024 that required TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to divest from the platform or face a ban, though Trump, after retaking the White House, delayed its enforcement indefinitely.
Since first extending the date by which ByteDance is required to divest from TikTok – and place the app into the hands of an American-based company – Trump has gone on to extend it four more times, granting Trump the power to shut the app down at a moment’s notice “with a stroke of the president’s pen.”
