The United States Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court ruling that rejected an injunction to prevent a law from taking effect that requires TikTok parent ByteDance to divest its American business operations under threat of banishment from domestic app stores.
The decision was unanimous.
In upholding the law, the Supreme Court said Congress “has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collecting practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
That adversary is China, the country where ByteDance is headquartered and where much of its software and services-related business operates.
With concerns mounting over ByteDance’s relationship with China and the company’s data collection practices, Congress last year passed a measure that requires the company to spin off or sell its American business, effectively separating the U.S. version of TikTok from ByteDance entirely. If it does not — and it has indicated it won’t — the law requires U.S.-based app stores run by Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and others to pull the TikTok app, making it unavailable to those who don’t already have the app downloaded to their phones, tablets, TVs and computers.
Nothing prevents the shutdown of TikTok entirely, and Americans are still free to use the service. Tens of millions of Americans do, with TikTok solidifying its position over the years as a mainstream source of entertainment, music and news.
But the law goes further than an app store ban, in that it requires any American company who provides services or support to TikTok to withdraw their involvement with the company. Oracle, which provides the underlying technology that allows TikTok’s services to work in the U.S., would also be required to stop providing services to the platform. That leaves TikTok with very few options to continue operating.
This week, ByteDance executives were readying plans to pull the plug on the service on Sunday, when the law takes effect. The app will function only to the extent that users will receive a notification about the new law, along with guidance on how to contact their lawmakers, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans.
Rather than sell off its business, ByteDance chose instead to fight the law in court, arguing that the measure was a violation of its First Amendment rights and those of its tens of millions of stateside users.
A lower court rejected that argument when ByteDance requested an injunction months ago, and an appellate court upheld the lower court’s finding. The Supreme Court order on Friday was the final nail in that coffin.
“Data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the Supreme Court wrote in its opinion. “But 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.”
Those national security concerns have only been vaguely offered by government officials publicly. In a broad sense, those officials — which include lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle — argue that ByteDance’s cozy relationship with China could allow data collected from TikTok to be misappropriated for purposes of surveillance and espionage.
Precisely how that might work remains something of a mystery, and government officials have offered little evidence to back their claim that any of those practices have or might take place.
On Thursday, a senior White House official told ABC News that the Biden administration will not enforce the TikTok ban, because the law takes effect one day before the president leaves office.
Instead, it will be up to the incoming administration to enforce the ban, should they choose to do so, the official said.
“The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect it,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on social media. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!”
Earlier, Trump affirmed a conversation with Chinese government officials in which both sides explored ways to continue offering TikTok in the U.S., should the Supreme Court wind up siding against the service, as they ultimately did.
One possible scenario could involve Elon Musk acquiring TikTok’s stateside business and running it alongside X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he acquired in a hostile takeover nearly two years ago. Bloomberg was the first to report on that potential plan, which TikTok officials have characterized as “fiction” without disputing it outright.
