FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Tick-tock goes the TikTok clock as we wait to learn the fate of the app with nearly 170 million users in the United States.
Haliegh Rosa is one of them. She doesn’t do it for a living, but, one of her videos, featuring Fort Lauderdale firefighters helping her and her wheelchair up to her 31st-floor apartment, went viral in 2023, getting 16 million views.
“It’s interesting to me that their focus is solely on TikTok right now,” she said.
“They” being Congress, which passed a law forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app, or face a ban in the U.S.
Lawmakers say it’s a national security risk.
TikTok says such a ban would violate First Amendment rights and free speech.
Kevin Frazier, a constitutional law and emerging technology scholar with St. Thomas University, weighed in.
“More companies, more bad actors, more competitive adversaries are gathering more and more information about Americans, and so, this is a really important test case in seeing what actions can congress take to try to advance its national security interest, and how do we balance that,” he said, adding that based on Friday’s oral arguments, TikTok’s U.S. days might be numbered.
“The justices seem pretty inclined to say that this isn’t implicating the First Amendment rights as directly as TikTok claims they are, and the so it seems like the security concerns advanced by congress are likely to win the day here,” Frazier said.
Either way, Rosa said the social media machine can’t stop, won’t stop.
“People will go elsewhere, there are other apps,” she said. “And just like when TikTok came out, another app will come along.”