Right-wingers being deplatformed from Twitter was apparently a big enough issue that Musk spent $44 billion just so he could take the reins of that platform. Clearly, being able to reach your intended audience has a significant value attached to it.

Trump's initial EO was likely because he initially assumed TikTok to be full of liberals (and a handful of TikTok's users were using the platform to prank his rallies), not because it represented a genuine national security threat.

The bill passed in Congress as a rider to a foreign aid spending bill, on its own it had originally failed to garner enough support.

That just leaves the SCOTUS as the sole potentially rational arbiter, and their interpretation was that it's perfectly fine to nuke a virtual town square, because you're not targeting a specific group of speakers. Obviously, we didn't get here overnight, but the fact that the 1A has been chipped away at enough that the court found precedence to back this up is disturbing, to say the least. The real world analogy would be a city entirely banning all public demonstrations within the city limits. Which, at least according to some quick ChatGPT research, actually is a thing:

The First Amendment protects the right to assemble and protest, but cities can regulate time, place, and manner. Courts have found that such regulations must be content-neutral, narrowly tailored, and leave open alternative channels for communication. However, these standards are sometimes inconsistently applied.

So, if it makes you feel better, just imagine that what I'm complaining about is that damned asterisk next to the 1A, put there by the previous court cases.

Let's be honest, 77 million American voters didn't hold Trump accountable. There's only so much blame you can place on our legal institutions when democracy willingly produced this result.

Well, you're gonna be really disappointed when Trump does absolutely nothing meaningful about those social war issues you're so concerned about, while simultaneously failing to reduce the price of groceries. He will, however, happily sell you some meme coins.

We keep guns around, devices which are literally intended for killing, because it says so in the constitution. Just like we've learned to live with all the problems caused by guns, we were supposed to either work around or just come to accept the problems inherent to allowing Americans to venture out onto the global internet. That's how freedom works. There is no sensible argument for banning TikTok, only a vain attempt at justifying a loss of freedom.

"A foreign adversary is going to use their influence to undermine our country." Yep, that's what they tell the citizens in every non-free country when their corrupt government bans something. Clearly, it works.

The entire TikTok ban has been a textbook example of how legislation has gone horribly wrong in this country.

The idea began as an EO by Trump during his first term, which Biden then undid with his own EO. Then it returned as a bill in Congress and ultimately passed as a rider attached to a foreign aid spending bill, and was signed into law by former president Biden. Under any reasonable interpretation of the 1A, deplatforming 170 million Americans should've been considered unconstitutional, but SCOTUS considered it only from the perspective of whether a foreign company has a right to operate in the USA and totally ignored the millions of Americans who would have their Chinese-made soapbox yanked out from underneath them.

So, in the grand scheme of sticking to the principles this country is ostensibly supposed to uphold, dear leader bringing back TikTok with a stroke of his magic pen is entirely on-brand. This is now the America we live in.
 

And if he wants to waste more of his money buying yet another platform I don't use*, more power to him. He'll probably end up ruining it like he did to Twitter, but death by enshitification has become almost an internet tradition at this point.

* Seriously, even for all the bitching I've done recently about the ban, I don't even have a TikTok account. It's entirely the concept that the US government deplatformed 170 million Americans by attaching the ban as a rider to a foreign aid bill that really troubles me. Next time, it could be a platform I do actually use. The 1A was nice while it lasted.

Yeah, if you're cisgender, straight, white, Christian, male, can afford health insurance, and aren't reliant upon TikTok for earning a living, America is the bee's knees.

WaPo at least put "raising ethics issues" in their headline. It's not really the media's fault, hell, here's what Fox Business has to say about it:

That's hardly high praise, and again, this is from the most right-wing mainstream media outlet in the US. Yeah, the media is not calling for an impeachment, but that's because they know it wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. The American public actually voted for this, so you can expect the media to pivot to this "new normal".

The same SCOTUS that said deplatforming 170 million Americans isn't a 1A issue? I'm sure they'll praise Trump and ask him for some pointers on how they can launch their own SCOTUS coins. "Now you too can own a piece of America's highest court!"

Our rights and principles as a country are only as good as the people we've elected to uphold them.

"Dear leader says you can have TikTok back, and don't forget to buy his crypto" was totally not on my 2025 bingo card. When they say it's a slippery slope, they're not fucking kidding. It's a very short trip from world superpower to banana republic.

It shouldn't be, but who is going to hold Trump accountable? His own party doesn't care, the Democrats don't have enough seats to do anything, and the American public knew about Trump's crypto grifts before the election. There's no one else to blame, this is the America the majority voted for.

The thing is, timing matters. If TikTok had just launched in the USA and we gave 'em the boot because China bad, that's fine. After somewhere around 170 Americans are using the platform to share their thoughts, promote their businesses and connect with others, now you have a free speech problem.

It's rather similar to what happens if you let a building sit derelict, squatters take up residence and you continue to ignore the problem. Years later, you finally decide that building needs to be demolished but there's people living in it. Now, those squatters may actually have rights and you have to go through a far more complicated legal process to evict them. At least, that's what's supposed to happen.

Which is what the TikTok ban began as: an executive order by the first Trump administration. Then, under Biden's watch, the bill to ban TikTok was passed the House and Senate attached alongside a spending bill (for foreign aid, IIRC), and then signed when it reached his desk. My response to the OP was stating that if we're going to compare the actions of both presidents, Biden signing the bill into law is far more difficult to undo than Trump's original executive order.

Yes, in all likelihood a veto by Biden would've been purely performative, but it would've put the administration on record as opposing the ban. That obviously did not happen.

That isn't a car, it's a Bird scooter with a body kit.

There's workarounds, but they're far more inconvenient (you have to deal with expiring signatures and other various annoyances) than just going into the phone's settings and enabling apps from unknown sources, which is how it works on Android. Didn't you see that Reddit thread I linked to of iPhone users having a conniption fit because they can't reinstall TikTok?