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Could TikTok be about to go down the tubes in the United States this week?
We enter a week that will see some key decisions made about TikTok; as things stand, it doesn’t look good for the Chinese-owned social network, which faces a ban in the United States.
Arguments for and against have been heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the experts say it seems unlikely TikTok will garner enough support to survive a vote, meaning it could be removed from the App Store and Google Play on January 19. Donald Trump has promised to save it, imploring the Supreme Court for a postponement until after he takes office on January 20. But the signs are the ban on TikTok in the United States will be confirmed this week.
The Supreme Court is apparently weighing up whether the threat that TikTok may pose to national security outweighs the company’s rights under the First Amendment. It seems to be leaning toward the former, which would mean that, as has already happened in other countries, it could be banned in a market where it has some 170 million users.
In which case, the United States will join a long list of 34 countries with total or partial bans on the ByteDance-owned app, indicating that there is an increasingly widespread perception that a social network best known for hosting videos of dancing teenagers is, in practice, a tool used for electoral…
