Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban

The Supreme Court has sided with the Biden Administration on a law that could ban TikTok in the coming days. In a unanimous ruling, the court upheld the law, writing in an unsigned opinion that "TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the Government’s national security concerns."

The ruling marks the end of TikTok’s many legal challenges to a law, passed last spring, that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States. It comes amid mounting tensions between the US and China, and just days after the Biden Administration moved to restrict the export of GPUs used for AI applications.

TikTok’s future, however, remains uncertain. White House officials said Thursday that the Biden Administration would not enforce the ban on President Joe Biden's last day in office. Incoming President Donald Trump, who will be sworn in one day after the ban is supposed to take effect, has suggested he wants to “save” the app. That’s caused some speculation that he could instruct the Justice Department not to enforce the law or find some other arrangement that would allow the app to remain accessible. 

Earlier in the week, The Washington Post reported that Trump was considering an executive order that would give TikTok an additional "60 or 90 days" to comply with the law. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump's inauguration where he will sit alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. 

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding TikTok's future. "Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear, " he wrote. "All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional."

Free speech groups have denounced the law and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold it. “The Supreme Court’s ruling is incredibly disappointing, allowing the government to shut down an entire platform and the free speech rights of so many based on fear-mongering and speculation,” Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement. “By refusing to block this ban, the Supreme Court is giving the executive branch unprecedented power to silence speech it doesn’t like, increasing the danger that sweeping invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said in a statement that "the ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans' data privacy – only comprehensive consumer privacy legislation can achieve that goal."

TikTok users have also vocally opposed the ban. Before the law was passed, legions of fans called their Congressional representatives’ offices, urging them to not support the bill. The move may have had unintended consequences as some members of Congress accused TikTok, which had encouraged users to make the calls, of “interfering with the legislative process.” More recently, TikTok fans have pushed a number of previously unknown apps, including a Chinese social media app known as “RedNote” or Xiaohongshu, to the top of the app stores as they search for alternatives.

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