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How the US TikTok Ban Would Actually Work
The fate of TikTok now rests in the hands of the US Supreme Court. If a law banning the social video app this month is upheld, it won’t disappear from your phone—but it will get messy fast.
“The law really deliberately avoided saying that it was illegal to have the app on your phone,” says Milton Mueller, a professor and cofounder of the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in opposition of the ban. “It’s really difficult depending on a number of factors.” Aside from technical challenges, international companies may not be willing to risk flying in the face of US restrictions, particularly under an aggressive Trump administration that’s already threatened Greenland and economic penalties on other countries. A TikTok ban would almost guarantee a spike in searches and downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow people to appear as if they are in different geographic locations to get around restrictions on content—for instance, trying to watch Netflix while abroad.
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