WASHINGTON (AP) — TikTok said it will have to go “dark” this weekend unless the outgoing Biden administration assures the company it won’t force the popular app to shut down after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that on Friday Federal law has upheld banning the app unless it is sold by the China-based parent company.
The Supreme Court ruled in its ruling that the national security risk posed by TikTok’s ties to China outweighs concerns about restricting the free speech of the app or its 170 million users in the United States.
The decision came amid unusual political agitation from President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed to negotiate a solution, and President Joe Biden’s administration, which has signaled it will not enforce the law – which passed overwhelmingly bipartisan support – starting Sunday, his last full day in office.
“TikTok should continue to be available to Americans, but simply under U.S. ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress in drafting this law,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Statement and pointed out that measures to implement the law will be the responsibility of the fresh government.
TikTok released a statement tardy Friday that said: “Today’s statements from both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide service providers with the clarity and certainty necessary to maintain TikTok’s availability for.” vital to over 170 million Americans.”
“Unless the Biden Administration immediately issues a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers and ensure non-enforcement, TikTok will unfortunately be forced to cease operations on January 19,” the statement said.
A sale doesn’t appear to be imminent, and while experts have said the app won’t disappear from existing users’ phones after the law goes into effect, fresh users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. This will ultimately render the app unusable, according to Justice Department court filings.
Aware of TikTok’s popularity and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, Trump finds himself on the other side of arguments from prominent Senate Republicans who blame TikTok’s Chinese owner for failing to find a buyer yet. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision that TikTok was one of the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration, used the app to thank the fresh president for “his commitment to working with us to keep TikTok available.”
It is unclear what options will be available to Republican Trump when he is sworn in as president on Monday. The law allowed a 90-day break on the app’s restrictions if progress was made on a sale before it went into effect. Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the law for the Democratic Biden administration on the Supreme Court, told justices last week that it was uncertain whether the prospect of a sale after the law takes effect could trigger a 90-day deadline for TikTok.
The decision examines the intersection between the First Amendment and national security concerns in the rapidly changing field of social media, and the justices acknowledged in their opinion that the fresh terrain would be arduous to navigate because they knew relatively little about it.
“Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-founded national security concerns about TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, adding that the law “does not violate the applicant violates the First Amendment.” Right.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed brief separate opinions noting some reservations about the court’s decision but agreeing with the outcome.
“Without a doubt, the remedy that Congress and the President have chosen here is dramatic,” Gorsuch wrote. Still, he said he was convinced by the argument that China could gain access to “vast stores of personal information on tens of millions of Americans.”
Some digital rights groups criticized the court ruling shortly after it was released.
“Today’s unprecedented decision to uphold the TikTok ban harms the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in this country and around the world,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which is leading the challenge supported by TikTok has become federal law.
Content creators who opposed the law also worried about the impact of a TikTok shutdown on their business. “I’m very, very worried about what’s going to happen in the next few weeks,” said Desiree Hill, owner of Crown’s Corner mechanic shop in Conyers, Georgia. “And I’m very afraid of the decline I’ll see in customer outreach and fear I may lose my business in the next six months.”
At the hearing, the judges were told by a lawyer for TikTok and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese tech company that is its parent company, how arduous it would be to strike a deal, especially since Chinese law prohibits the sale of the proprietary algorithm that produced it The social media platform is extremely successful.
The app allows users to watch hundreds of videos in about half an hour, as some are only a few seconds long. This comes from a lawsuit filed by Kentucky last year alleging that TikTok is addictive and harmful to children’s mental health. Similar lawsuits have been filed by more than a dozen states. TikTok has called the claims faulty.
The dispute over TikTok’s ties to China has become the epitome of the geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing.
“ByteDance and its Chinese communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before Sunday’s deadline,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on X. “The very fact that communist China is refusing to sell it shows exactly what TikTok is.”: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court rightly rejected TikTok’s lies and propaganda disguised as legal arguments.”
The US has said it is concerned that TikTok is collecting enormous amounts of user data, including sensitive information about viewing habits, which could end up in the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned that the algorithm that drives what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can utilize it to alter content on the platform in ways that are arduous to detect.
TikTok notes that the U.S. has not provided evidence that China attempted to manipulate content on its U.S. platform or collect American user data through TikTok.
Biden signed the law in April. The law was the culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over TikTok, which the government views as a national security threat.
TikTok, which sued the government over the law last year, has long denied that it could be used as a tool of Beijing. A three-judge panel consisting of two Republican candidates and one Democratic nominee unanimously upheld the law in December, leading TikTok to quickly appeal to the Supreme Court.
Starting Sunday, without a sale to an approved buyer, the law prohibits app stores owned by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok. Internet hosting services are also banned from hosting TikTok.
ByteDance has said it will not be sold. But some investors have been keeping an eye on it, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt. McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative announced that she and her unnamed partners have submitted a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets. The consortium, which includes “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary, did not disclose the financial terms of the offer.
McCourt said in a statement after the ruling that his group was “ready to work with the company and President Trump to reach a deal.”
Prelogar told the justices last week that the law’s entry into force “could be the very impetus” for ByteDance to reconsider its position.
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Associated Press writers Haleluya Hadero, Mae Anderson and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report. Hadero reported from South Bend, Indiana, and Anderson reported from New York.
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