Somewhat to my surprise, it seems that the Tiktok ban has actually happened for our US friends - at least for now.
This is, I understand, is what our transatlantic cousins see when trying to access the site today:
I’m afraid the now-standard tech-billionaire-style Trump sycophancy implied in the message does nothing more than make me hope the ban lasts extra long, as emotional and irrational response as I know that is. Although Trump is thinking about undoing it on Monday, if he gets to it.
It’s especially galling as, let us never forget, it was Mr Trump back in 2020 that first decided he was going to ban Tiktok on the basis of its foreign ownership being a threat to national security. At the time it wasn’t clear exactly if or how this was possible, but that’s of course not the sort of thing that stops words coming out of Trump’s mouth.
A lawyers at the ACLU heralded this as A Good Thing:
“President Biden is right to revoke these Trump administration executive orders, which blatantly violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and WeChat users in the United States,” she said.
A year later, the Biden administration actually rolled back the Trump executive order that would have carried this out, in lieu of a new executive order that aimed to more generally “address the risks posed by ICTS transactions involving software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons that are owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary” .
It’s surely a threat that no-one can seriously doubt is a real one, wherever you personally fall on the issue of a Tiktok ban. I mean, there’s enough damage done by similar technology in the US when similar sites are not technically owned by a foreign adversary.
For what it’s worth, Tiktok still works over here in the UK, and as far as we know there are no plans for a similar ban.
“We won’t be following the same path as the Americans unless or until… there is a threat that we are concerned about in the British interest, and then of course we will keep it under review,” Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones said.