The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld a law that bans TikTok in the U.S. unless the platform’s Chinese parent company agrees to sell it before the January 19 deadline.
The ruling comes just days before the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is set to take effect. Biden reportedly does not plan to enforce the ban, which would go into place on his final day in office. Instead, the outgoing president will leave the decision to his successor.
TikTok now hopes President-elect Donald Trump may step in and come to its aid. Trump could intervene in several ways. First, he could instruct his attorney general not to enforce the law if he finds that TikTok has taken appropriate steps to distance itself from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. One of those steps is the app’s “Project Texas,” an effort to wall off Americans’ data from China.
The law also has an option to allow for a 90-day extension of the January 19 deadline if there is “significant progress” toward a sale, though that does not currently seem to be the case. Trump could step in and try to help negotiate a deal for TikTok’s sale to an American company or several investors.
The app would not immediately disappear from some 170 million U.S. users’ phones once the law takes effect. However, new users would be unable to download the app and updates would no longer be available for existing users, eventually making the app unusable.
“There is no doubt that . . . TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. 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,” the Court ruled in an unsigned opinion.
“For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” it adds.
TikTok asked the Supreme Court to step in after a federal appeals court upheld the law last month.
U.S. officials, including leaders at the Justice Department, have said TikTok poses a national security threat of “immense depth and scale” due to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
The company had previously unsuccessfully argued that the ban infringes on its First Amendment rights and that the law requiring divestment from ByteDance is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally,” particularly by the January 19 deadline.
During oral arguments on January 10, attorneys for TikTok and its users complained that Congress had singled out TikTok with the law, but the Justices were unmoved by the argument, with Justice Kavanaugh noting the government doesn’t need to take on every threat at once. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, meanwhile, pointed to the large scale of TikTok’s audience and the troubling specifics of its data collection, which involves collecting people’s contact lists and tracking their keystrokes.
Meanwhile, Trump, a one-time critic of the app who tried to ban it himself during his first term in office, has since flip-flopped on the issue and is likely to step in to save the popular short-form video app.
While he issued an executive order in 2020 demanding ByteDance sell TikTok or face a ban, Trump spoke out earlier this year against Congress’s renewed efforts to ban the app. He argued a ban on TikTok would only help Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”
Republican megadonor and billionaire Jeff Yass is reportedly one of the major influences behind Trump’s change of heart. Yass has a $33 billion stake in the short-form video platform.