The U.S. Supreme Court will allow the federal government to ban TikTok if the popular video-sharing app doesn’t find someone to sell itself to.
Incoming President Trump asked the Supreme Court to delay enforcement of the law. It declined and there is no obvious buyer for TikTok lined up. If nothing changes, the ban will start on Sunday, the day before Trump’s inauguration. Biden has said he won’t enforce the ban and will let Trump handle the problem.
How did we get here? TikTok is owned by the Chinese-based company ByteDance and legislators successfully argued over the past few years that it was feeding vast troves of American data into servers owned by the Chinese Communist Party. In 2024, a bipartisan bill passed that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok or have it banned on U.S. shores.
ByteDance fought the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the sale was a violation of the First Amendment Rights of millions of Americans. It was an argument the Supreme Court didn’t find persuasive.
“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” it said in its decision. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary. For the forgoing reasons, we conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”
In his concurrence, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch bemoaned the time constraints placed on the court regarding the decision and called into question its ultimate effectiveness. “Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know,” he wrote. “A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another. As time passes and threats evolve, less dramatic and more effective solutions may emerge. Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear.”
People have already moved on to the other apps. Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, another Chinese-based video app has surged in popularity while the court heard the case. Thousands of Americans have flocked to the app and there’s been a cross-pollination of people in China and the U.S. that we haven’t seen before. Americans are already teaching Chinese users how to build 3D-printed guns. Chinese users are teaching Americans that their views of China might be warped.
But what happens in the future or what other apps come along aren’t the court’s concern. “The question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality,” Gorsuch said. “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional. Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to attend Trump events this weekend as well as the inauguration. What happens now is anyone’s guess.