The Supreme Court has upheld the law that will effectively ban TikTok on Sunday, January 19. The decision marks the end of TikTok’s months-long legal fight against a law that essentially forces the ByteDance-owned app to shut down unless it divests its U.S. operations.
As of Sunday, it will be illegal for app stores and internet hosting services to distribute the social network. TikTok has warned that the app will simply “go dark” on Sunday, but it’s unclear what exactly will happen once the ban takes effect.
In an opinion published just moments ago, the Supreme Court said it was writing in response to an appeal from three groups of petitioners, “two TikTok operating entities and a group of U. S. TikTok users,” who requested the ban — as a result of the new Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — be dismissed on First Amendment grounds.
“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,” the court writes in the unsigned opinion. “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.”
The decision comes days after TikTok pleaded its case before the nation’s highest court, arguing that the law conflicts with the First Amendment, and that the social network needed extra time to allow President elect-Donald Trump to act to save the app.
During the hearing, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that the law doesn’t violate the First Amendment because it doesn’t aim to regulate free speech on the platform or its algorithm. The DOJ also argued that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to secretly turn over the data of millions of Americans.
Throughout the legal battle, TikTok argued that divesting the app’s U.S. operations would be impossible because China would prevent the export of the social network’s algorithm. The company also claimed that TikTok would be a fundamentally different service with a different algorithm.
Today, the Supreme Court acknowledge all of this and more, summarizing the longer TikTok saga since 2020 in its opinion. But it also came to the conclusion that the Act as it was spelled out “appears appropriately tailored to the problem it seeks to address. Without doubt, the remedy Congress and the President chose here is dramatic.”
Yet the Supreme Court also highlighted the difficulties of ruling on technology, essentially a moving target in terms of what can be achieved with it, both in terms of positive potential but also harm.
“We should take care not to ’embarrass the future,’” the court noted in its opinion today.
President Biden signed the sell-or-ban law back in April 2024. The bill followed years of allegations from the U.S. government that TikTok’s ties to China pose a national security risk and that it exposes Americans’ sensitive information to the Chinese government.
More to come. Refresh for updates.