Though President-elect Donald Trump has been expected to stop the looming ban on TikTok, his political appointments suggest otherwise.

Trump also announced that he has chosen Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that oversees the internet as well as the news media and other forms of communication. Carr, whom Trump tapped for the FCC in 2017, wrote the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 chapter on the commission, in which he lays out an agenda at times in opposition to the president-elect's promises.

"TikTok poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America's national security," Carr wrote in Project 2025. "It also provides Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans."

While there hasn't been public evidence that the Chinese government accessed data from American TikTok users, there has been proof that ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, accessed user data on TikTok.

It is surprising that Trump should now be positioned to reverse the ban on TikTok, given how, at the end of his first term, he signed an executive order that effectively banned the app in 2020. However, after Joe Biden took over as president, Trump's executive order became void. Still, what the government under Biden came to was, in a way, the same: the president signed a bill that would force ByteDance to sell the app, though the Chinese conglomerate is unlikely to comply.

"Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people," Trump said in March at CNBC. The former president also expressed this view on Truth Social, posting, "Mark Zuckerberg's company is a true enemy of the people."

In a statement responding to Carr's confirmation, Trump does not mention their apparent disagreements.

"Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech and has fought against regulatory lawfare that has stifled Americans' freedoms, and held back our economy," Trump wrote.

Carr's fear of Chinese influence extends to the sale of communications equipment, for instance, cell phones, made in China. As it stands, Chinese hardware company Huawei cannot sell gear in the U.S. without FCC approval, and Carr thinks that the FCC should be more vigilant about assessing products from Chinese manufacturers. He even wants to invest an extra $3 billion into the "rip and replace" program that reimburses communications providers for replacing gear from Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese company making telecom equipment.

While Carr has pursued largely deregulatory policies within the FCC, he remains insistent on increasing further regulation over tech companies.

"We need to take apart the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for average Americans," wrote Carr on X. Fellow Trump appointee Elon Musk responded, "Based."

This freedom is extended to Section 230, a component of the Communications Decency Act that also serves in part to protect online service providers, such as social media services, from liability when it comes to hosting content generated by their users. If someone posts content that would break some law on a social media app, the user — and not the app — will be liable for such consequences. Section 230 also lets organizations of the online remove and moderate third-party content.

Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argue that the overturn of this bipartisan legislation, current for over 25 years, could threaten free speech on the Internet.

"Without Section 230's protections, many online intermediaries would intensely filter and censor user speech, while others may simply not host user content at all," the EFF wrote. "This reinforces the First Amendment's protections for publishers to decide what content they will distribute."

Yet Carr wants Section 230 reform because it gives social media outlets free reign to "drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square." He thinks that the FCC should collaborate with Congress to ensure that "internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections.

Section 230 has been challenged at the Supreme Court level, but so far, it has remained free from major reforms. Last year, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Twitter and Google in two adjacent cases dealing with holding the platforms liable for their hosting contents from Islamic State that were describing the organization itself as a means of promoting the terrorist organization in the context of committing violent attacks.

The same Supreme Court that adjudicated those cases is likely to be in charge for the foreseeable future, and perhaps they would hear more internet law challenges in the future years.