Supreme Court upholds law forcing sale or closure of TikTok

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law requiring the sale or closure of TikTok, as the justices rejected the social media platform’s First Amendment claims and a plea from President-elect Donald Trump.

The unanimous decision means ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, must sell the app by Sunday or else U.S. marketplaces and tech companies will have to stop supporting the app on their platforms.

The justices, in their unanimous ruling, said the national security implications of Chinese ownership take precedence.

“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion.

TikTok and some of its users filed lawsuits challenging the law, saying it tramples their First Amendment rights to associate and speak freely. They also claimed TikTok was being unfairly singled out.

The Justice Department, under President Biden, defended the law, arguing that it targeted a foreign adversary and did not trample any free speech protections.

---

SEE ALSO: TikTok blames Biden White House, Justice Dept. for being ‘forced to go dark’

---

In their ruling, the justices said the government “had good reason” to target TikTok specifically, given the national security concerns about Chinese ownership. The justices also said the law did not discriminate on TikTok’s content.

“Data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age. 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,” the opinion read.

The Biden administration has kicked the enforcement of the law to the incoming administration.

“Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

The app is set to go dark, though, a day before Mr. Trump takes office, leaving the current lay of the land unclear for the future of the app.

“The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect it. My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay Tuned!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social.

The Biden Justice Department, though, cheered the ruling.

“The Court’s decision enables the Justice Department to prevent the Chinese government from weaponizing TikTok to undermine America’s national security,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew thanked Mr. Trump for his support and said seven million American businesses use the platform.

“To all American users, thank you for making our TikTok community such a rich and vibrant place,” he said. “More to come.”

U.S. officials have said they fear Beijing would pressure ByteDance to skew the content pushed to American users, promoting Chinese propaganda or anti-American messages. Members of Congress also said they fear ByteDance could scoop up massive amounts of data on American users — information that could be used for blackmail or other nefarious purposes later.

In Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s concurrence, he noted that TikTok collects user data — but also data from the user’s contact list that may not have consented to such collection.

Justice Gorsuch said he was pleased to see the court did not rely on the federal government’s sealed information that was kept from the challengers, suggested sealed evidence being kept from one party presents an issue that should be addressed at a later time.

“Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns,” he wrote.

TikTok, meanwhile, said those fears were speculative and it was “unlikely” TikTok would bow to any such Chinese plan. But the justices said Congress is within its rights to think otherwise — and to act on that belief.

“The challenged provisions further an important Government interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression and do not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further that interest,” the court said. “On this record, Congress was justified in specifically addressing its TikTok-related national security concerns.”

But the court was less sold on the claims of propaganda manipulation.

The American Civil Liberties Union slammed the decision as “incredibly disappointing.”

“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,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project.

But Sen. Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the ruling punctured TikTok’s “lies and propaganda.”

“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,” he said.

TikTok is a U.S.-based company, but its primary social media app uses computer source code from ByteDance, including the algorithm that decides which content to promote.

Congress approved the legislation with strong bipartisan support in April, and Mr. Biden signed it into law. The legislation gave ByteDance 270 days to sell the company.

TikTok said a divestiture was impossible in that timeframe, and said the law amounts to a ban on the app for American users.

Mr. Trump had urged the justices to delay implementation of the law.

He said once in office he would try to strike a deal that would protect the company while also preserving U.S. national security.

That’s a reversal for Mr. Trump, who had previously expressed concerns about TikTok.

He has since warmed up to the app, saying it helped him do well with young voters in the 2024 election.

On Friday he said he had held a telephone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping and TikTok came up in the discussion.

He did not reveal what was said.

“The call was a very good one for both China and the USA,” Mr. Trump said.

While Friday’s high court ruling was unanimous, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate opinion to say she thought the court should have been explicit in deciding that the law does implicate First Amendment concerns for both the company and its users.

Justice Gorsuch also wrote praise for his colleagues for not accepting the argument that TikTok could be used to spread Chinese propaganda.

“One man’s ‘covert content manipulation’ is another’s ‘editorial discretion,’” he wrote. “Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all kinds routinely make less-than-transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them.”

He said, though, that the data-scooping concerns were real enough to uphold the law — even if he was skeptical of its effectiveness.

“Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another.”