Not too long ago, Donald Trump was a big fan of banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app that went offline in the U.S. early Sunday under a controversial ban. On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law, passed by bipartisan majorities last April, largely due to concerns that the Chinese government used the platform to spy on Americans. President Joe Biden signed that law, but only four years after Trump, while still president, tried and failed to ban the app through executive order. TikTok allows "the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage," Trump said in the 2020 order.
There's good reason to believe Trump's personal reasons weren't so noble. For one thing, he's racist against Chinese people and apparently believes COVID-19 was somehow their fault, instead of seeing them as the first victims of a mutated virus. However, while U.S. intelligence services are frustratingly tight-lipped about the specific evidence, both common sense and the testimony of more trustworthy politicians who have seen the intel — including Biden — suggest that the accusation of foreign spying is almost certainly true. Nor is this a "free speech" issue. The right to speak out, even online, has not changed. The government's authority here is to determine what foreign companies are allowed to operate within our borders, a nearly ironclad power.
