The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday morning upheld the law banning TikTok that is set to go into effect on Sunday, Jan. 19. TikTok, which has 170 million monthly American users, had argued the ban tramples on the First Amendment rights of both the app and its users — an argument that the court ultimately shot down on Friday.
“We conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate the petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” the court said in a unsigned unanimous opinion.
President Joe Biden signed the law banning TikTok from the U.S. last April, unless the app’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, sold its American business. The chief concern U.S. lawmakers said they have with TikTok is that it could double as a spyware app for the Chinese communist government; TikTok, per Chinese law, is required to share user data if asked to do so.
On Friday, the Supreme Court sided with the government, finding that the “national security justifications — countering China’s data collection and covert content manipulation efforts — were compelling, and that the [law] was narrowly tailored to further those interests.”
The law banning TikTok prohibits new downloads of the app and also bars Apple and Google’s app stores from offering TikTok, starting Sunday. It also prevents the app from updating on the phones of existing users — something that would ultimately make TikTok unusable for its American users. Earlier this week, TikTok said it will go one step further and shut the app down for all of its U.S. users on Sunday, if the ban was not overturned.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. may now depend on President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he would like to “save” the app.
The incoming Trump Administration is considering issuing an executive order that would overturn the ban; that move, at minimum, could buy ByteDance more time to make a deal to sell the app, as the executive order gets weighed by the courts. ByteDance, though, has said it does not want to sell TikTok.
If Trump “did engage in an activity essentially to postpone the ban, it might provide more leeway to find an alternative divestment opportunity, just given the amount of time it would take to go through the court to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to challenge this executive order,’” Lily Li, a tech-focused attorney for Metaverse Law in Newport Beach, told TheWrap.
You can read more about how Trump may be able to save TikTok — as well as what creators and users feel about the looming ban — by clicking here.
On Thursday, the Biden Administration signaled it would leave enforcement of the ban to Trump, who is set to take office next Monday.
But TikTok, based on ByteDance’s unwillingness to sell the app and its plan to shut down on Sunday, may already have went dark for 170 million Americans by the time Trump reenters the White House.
