The Supreme Court Could Be About to Kill TikTok
The Supreme Court signaled on Friday that it is considering upholding Congress’s ban on TikTok until the platform separates itself from its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance.
The court declined to pause the law while deliberating the case, implying that a decision could arrive before the ban is slated to take effect on January 19.
TikTok’s lawyer Noel Francisco explained the impact of the law in blunt terms before the court on Friday: “At least as I understand it, we go dark,” Francisco said, according to Forbes. “It’s essentially gonna stop operating, I think that’s the consequence of this law.”
TikTok has argued that the law banning its presence in the United States is a violation of its First Amendment rights, while the government has claimed the app’s erasure from the American market is a matter of national security.
Justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum appeared skeptical of TikTok’s arguments, pointing out that the law did not target free expression on the app itself but rather ByteDance’s foreign ownership and the residual implications of a powerful foreign algorithm in the U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”
But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
ByteDance announced shortly after President Joe Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company didn’t “have any plans to sell.” But that may have changed since the law passed at the start of the year. Last month, James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR that China could be willing to trade off TikTok and its proprietary algorithm to American investors in exchange for a better deal from Trump on his massive tariff proposal.
Some of Trump’s allies could be waiting in the wings for that to happen. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has business ties to the Chinese media industry, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.