Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Paving Way for Sunday Shutdown

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday morning upheld the law banning TikTok that is set to go into effect on Sunday, Jan. 19. TikTok, which has 170 million monthly American users, had argued the ban tramples on the First Amendment rights of both the app and its users — an argument that the court ultimately shot down on Friday.

“We conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate the petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” the court said in a unanimous opinion.

President Joe Biden signed the law banning TikTok from the U.S. last April, unless the app’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, sold its American business. The chief concern U.S. lawmakers said they have with TikTok is that it could double as a spyware app for the Chinese communist government; TikTok, per Chinese law, is required to share user data if asked to do so.

The law banning TikTok prohibits new downloads of the app and also bars Apple and Google’s app stores from offering TikTok, starting Sunday. It also prevents the app from updating on the phones of existing users — something that would ultimately make TikTok unusable for its American users.

TikTok’s future in the U.S. may now depend on President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he would like to “save” the app.

The incoming Trump Administration is considering issuing an executive order that would overturn the ban; that move, at minimum, could buy ByteDance more time to make a deal to sell the app, as the executive order gets weighed by the courts. ByteDance, though, has said it does not want to sell TikTok.

If Trump “did engage in an activity essentially to postpone the ban, it might provide more leeway to find an alternative divestment opportunity, just given the amount of time it would take to go through the court to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to challenge this executive order,’” Lily Li, a tech-focused attorney for Metaverse Law in Newport Beach, told TheWrap.

You can read more about how Trump may be able to save TikTok — as well as what creators and users feel about the looming ban — by clicking here.

On Thursday, the Biden Administration signaled it would leave enforcement of the ban to Trump, who is set to take office next Monday.

More to come…

The post Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Paving Way for Sunday Shutdown appeared first on TheWrap.