With Few Good Tools, Biden Needs New Law to Ban TikTok, experts say

Courts blocked a prior bid by the Trump administration to ban the app in part on the grounds that such a move violated free speech protections.

That means any move to block the app likely depends on passage of legislation like the RESTRICT ACT, a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators this month granting the Commerce Department new power to ban foreign technology that poses a national security risk. That would circumvent the speech protections embedded in existing law, lawyers and China watchers said.

"RESTRICT is really helpful because it gives this completely new, from scratch, legal authority that doesn’t have any of those complications" under other laws, said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former deputy assistant U.S. Trade Representative. "It’s a much stronger, cleaner legal authority."

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