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The Supreme Court on Friday rejected TikTok’s challenge to a law that could effectively ban the short-form video app in the United States.
By Sapna Maheshwari and Amanda Holpuch
The Supreme Court ruled against TikTok on Friday, rejecting the short-form video app’s appeal of a law that effectively bans it in the United States.
Concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and gain access to sensitive user data through the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, prompted Congress to pass legislation to ban the social media platform unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer.
President Biden signed the legislation into law in April, giving ByteDance until Jan. 19 to divest from TikTok. The company lost its first legal effort to overturn the law on Dec. 6 when a panel of three federal judges unanimously rejected TikTok’s argument that the law violated the First Amendment.
There is a chance that President-elect Donald J. Trump will try to rescue the app, which boasts 170 million users in the United States, but the law is scheduled to go into effect the day before his inauguration.
Here’s why the pressure has been ratcheted up on TikTok and what it means for users.
Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.
They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israeli-Hamas war and during the presidential election. Critics say TikTok has fueled the spread of antisemitism.
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