Supreme Court: TikTok to be banned unless sold

The Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold the federal ban on the social media app TikTok, paving the way for it to no longer be available to new users as soon as Sunday.

In a 9-0 decision, the highest court upheld the law, meaning that as of Sunday, no new TikTok users can be added in America and no new updates can be downloaded by existing users, rendering the app useless in time. 

The one possibility of change would be that the restrictions would be lifted if the parent company of TikTok - the China-based ByteDance, sold the app.

President Joe Biden said he would not sign the law into effect on Sunday - his last day in office - putting the onus on enacting the ban on incoming President Donald Trump. 

Trump had a call with Chinese leader Xi Jingping on Friday and indicated that TikTok was one of the things that was discussed. 

ByteDance and its Chinese Communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before the Sunday deadline. The very fact that Communist China refuses to permit its sale reveals exactly what TikTok is: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court correctly rejected TikTok’s lies and…

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 17, 2025

How Trump - who has nearly 15 million followers on TikTok himself - handles this ban will be interesting. The law originally allowed for a 90-day pause on restrictions to the app if there was evidence of progression toward a sale of the app. However, no deal appears to be imminent. 

For their part, the Supreme Court justices found themselves unified in making a decision that that felt put national security ahead of freedom of speech and expression for the more than 170 million TikTok users in America.

Congress passed the law last year after concerns with how TikTok collects user data, and the possibility of that data on Americans could be shared with the Chinese government. Congress also alleges the TikTok algorithm is constructed in such a way that it can be manipulated by the Chinese government.