TikTok faces U.S. ban

The Supreme Court left TikTok’s sale-or-ban law in place on January 17, 2025, putting the app on a path to disappear from United States app stores unless ByteDance sold it. (supremecourt.gov) In a per curiam opinion, the justices said the law could take effect on January 19, 2025, and described TikTok as a platform with more than 170 million United States users. The Court said Congress had acted on national-security concerns tied to Chinese control of the app. (supremecourt.gov) The law is the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which President Joe Biden signed on April 24, 2024. It bars companies in the United States from distributing, maintaining, or hosting TikTok unless there is a “qualified divestiture” approved under the statute. (congress.gov) Congress wrote TikTok directly into the law through ByteDance, and the deadline for ByteDance-owned apps was 270 days after enactment. A Congressional Research Service summary said that clock set TikTok’s trigger date at January 19, 2025. (congress.gov) The Court did not say TikTok’s speech interests were trivial. It said the law targeted foreign control and the data-collection and content-manipulation risks Congress tied to that control, not the ideas posted on the app. (supremecourt.gov) TikTok answered that the law functioned as a ban on a major speech platform used by 170 million Americans and seven million businesses. In its April 24, 2024 statement, the company said it had invested billions of dollars to protect United States user data and would challenge the measure in court. (newsroom.tiktok.com) The case moved fast at the end. The Supreme Court turned emergency applications filed on December 16, 2024 into full review on December 18, heard argument on January 10, 2025, and ruled a week later. (supremecourt.gov) A ban under this law would not have looked like federal agents deleting TikTok from phones. The statute instead cut off app-store distribution, updates, maintenance, and hosting support in the United States, which would make the service harder to access and harder to keep running. (congress.gov) TikTok also prepared for a shutdown as the deadline approached. Reuters reported on January 15, 2025 that the company was preparing to turn off the app for United States users on Sunday if the Court did not intervene. (cnbc.com) The legal deadline arrived one day before Donald Trump returned to office. On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration looked for a deal. (politico.com) That order did not erase the Court’s ruling or repeal the statute Congress passed. It bought time for negotiations over a sale that, at the moment of the decision, still had not materialized. (supremecourt.gov)