Live Updates: Supreme Court Backs Law Requiring TikTok to Be Sold or Banned
The decision came a week after the justices heard a First Amendment challenge to a law aimed at the wildly popular short-form video platform used by 170 million Americans that the government fears could be influenced by China.
The Supreme Court ruled against TikTok on Friday, rejecting the social media company’s First Amendment challenge to the law that effectively bans it in the United States starting on Sunday.
The unanimous decision may deal a death blow to the U.S. operations of the wildly popular app, which serves up short-form videos that are a leading source of information and entertainment to tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones.
“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,” the decision said. “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.”
President Biden signed the law last spring after it passed in Congress with wide bipartisan support. Lawmakers said the app’s ownership was a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies allowed it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread covert disinformation or propaganda.
Although TikTok’s lawyer told the justices last week that the app would “go dark” if it lost the case, it was not clear how quickly a shutdown would play out. At a minimum, app store operators like Apple and Google face significant penalties imposed by the law if they distribute and update the TikTok app.
The app stores and cloud providers have a strong incentive to comply with the ban on TikTok. Under the law, those companies would pay penalties as high as $5,000 per user who is able to gain access to the app inside the United States if the ban takes effect.
The decision was delivered on an exceptionally abbreviated schedule. The justices heard arguments last Friday, and a majority of them appeared satisfied with the government’s position that the law was aimed not at TikTok’s speech rights but rather at its ownership. Noel J. Francisco, a lawyer for TikTok, did not dispute the security risks but argued that the government could address them through other means rather than effectively ordering the app to “go dark.”
Here’s what to know:
The new administration: The Biden administration has said that given the timing, it would fall to the incoming administration to enforce the law. President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has signaled his support for the app, had explored the possibility of an executive order that could allow TikTok to keep operating despite the pending ban. It is unclear whether the tactic would withstand legal challenges or even how such an order would work. Just before the decision was released, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he had spoken with President Xi Jinping of China about a number of topics including TikTok but did not elaborate.
A cultural juggernaut: TikTok gained a foothold in American culture in 2020 as a pandemic curiosity and swiftly grew into an undeniable juggernaut. About one-third of U.S. adults say they use TikTok, and that number jumps to 59 percent for adults under 30, according to Pew Research. The app has given rise to a new crop of celebrities and fueled chart-topping books, music and movies. The app has also increasingly become a source of news, helping to shape conversation around the Israel-Hamas war and last year’s U.S. presidential election.
A bipartisan bill: Regulating TikTok was one of the rare topics that U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle united on last year. The law went from publicly introduced to signed by Mr. Biden in about seven weeks, earning it the nickname “Thunder Run” on Capitol Hill. The legislative effort got underway soon after Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, testified to Congress about the video app’s ties to China in March 2023.
David McCabe contributed reporting.
Feeling the sudden need to save your TikTok videos in case the site abruptly goes away? Here are a few methods for nontechnical users who want copies of the videos they personally uploaded or made on TikTok. You can also download a copy of your TikTok data right from your account, which doesn’t get you the video files themselves but will give other items including your direct messages and followers list.
Here’s how.
Download Individual Videos
If you just want to save a few favorite videos you made on the fly, snagging them one by one is fairly straightforward. To download a video on an Android or iPhone, go to your TikTok profile page, select a clip, tap the three-dot menu icon on the right side of the screen and tap Save Video. You can then email it to yourself, upload it to Google Drive (or another cloud service) or save it to your phone’s Files app or designated downloads area. Repeat as needed until you have all the videos you want.
You can also download videos on a computer by logging into your account on the TikTok site and right-clicking on a video. You should see a pop-up menu with the Download Video option. Note that when you download directly from the web browser, the clips typically have the TikTok watermark embedded.
If you don’t see a download option in the menu or have trouble saving a video, make sure the video or your account is set to public, not private.
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“It’s been a brutal beatdown of TikTok this whole way,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. “They went zero for 12 judges who listened to their case,” he said.
He said that it was unclear what might happen next with TikTok under Trump, based on his limited legal options but his desire to save the app.
The Chinese government has previously said that it would oppose any forced sale of TikTok. Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said last March that Washington’s move to force the sale or ban the app was “sheer robbers’ logic to try every means to snatch from others all the good things that they have.”
TikTok’s grip on America’s youth has been the bane of many parents, who complain their children are glued to the app and often encounter harmful content there.
But the app’s potential ban prompted mixed feelings and some nostalgia among parents this week. Some said good riddance, while others expressed concern that the government had overstepped by restricting their children’s free expression.
Kate Gillan, a mother of four children ages 5 to 13, in Madison, N.J., said she would miss the coordinated dances her daughter recorded with her friends.
“As Americans, we tend to swing way too far one way or the other when it comes to tech — it’s either so great or so bad — and there is so much more nuance,” Ms. Gillan said.
Erik Zilineck’s 13-year-old son, Evren, has used the app to dive into his passions for cologne, music and cars. The father and son, who live outside Boston, talk about videos they see of soccer and specialty cars.
U.S. lawmakers said they were banning the app over national security concerns because TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is a Chinese company. But Mr. Zilineck said he was skeptical of those claims when regulators had failed to do much to rein in tech companies in the United States.
“We’re trying to stop the flow of data to China but don’t do anything to protect our data here?” Mr. Zilineck said. Europe has greater privacy protections for consumers than in the United States, he added.
Legislators and regulators have recently raised new alarms about the role of social media’s effects on children. Last year, the Surgeon General called for a warning label on social media apps for youth, saying the technology has contributed to bullying, the exploitation of children and the mental health crisis among younger people. Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, backed the TikTok ban in part over the way it kept users hooked, he said in a social media post. He said TikTok and other platforms were “attention fracking” the minds of American children.
“My oldest is 4 and a half. The way I see it, I’ve got about five years to rein in social media corporations before my kids start using this stuff,” he said in the post on BlueSky.
His views reflect the way many parents have become wary of their children’s use of social media.
“I don’t think TikTok is a great platform for kids, neither is Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or BlueSky or really any form of social media,” said Matt Lorscheider, of Altadena, Calif. His children don’t use TikTok, but he shares TikTok videos with his 10- and 7-year-old sons and uploads videos of their soccer practice on the app.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTFree speech advocates slammed the decision. The American Civil Liberties Union said that the ruling allows “the government to shut down an entire platform and the free speech rights of so many based on fear-mongering and speculation.” It urged President Biden and President Donald J. Trump to grant TikTok an extension under the law that requires divestment talks, or to ask the Justice Department not to enforce it.
Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, criticized the ruling in a statement on Bluesky: “TikTok’s future will turn on politics, not on today’s ruling, but by upholding the ban, the Court has markedly expanded the government’s power to censor in the name of national security. Its implications for TikTok may be limited, but the ruling creates a lot of space for other repressive policies.”
The government had also submitted some kind of classified evidence to the Supreme Court. The justices wrote in a footnote that their holding and analysis was based on the public record and that they had made no reference to that evidence.
Justice Gorsuch also highlighted that decision in his concurrence, saying he was pleased that the court had declined to consider it. Remarking that “efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns” since the other side needs an opportunity to contest it, he suggested that Congress or a judicial committee that comes up with rules and procedures might want to consider coming up with a system to deal with this kind of issue.
The app stores and cloud providers have a strong incentive to comply with the ban on TikTok. Under the law, those companies would pay penalties as high as $5,000 per user who is able to access the app inside the United States if the ban takes effect. TikTok says it has 170 million monthly U.S. users.
Katie Mogg spent an average of one and a half hours per day on TikTok last week.
When Savannah Kalata, a high school senior, wakes up in the morning, the first thing she does is turn off her alarm. The second thing she does is open TikTok.
“It’s just like this quick fix,” said Ms. Kalata, 18, who lives in Minnesota. “I can’t take my eyes off it.”
Ms. Kalata spends about two and a half hours a day on TikTok, she said. She watches videos while she’s eating, while she’s walking on the treadmill, and while she’s in bed before she goes to sleep. “I feel like my phone can kind of control me at times,” she said. “I don’t even necessarily want to go on TikTok. It’s a habit, and it’s something that’s hard to break.”
Ms. Kalata may have to quit cold turkey.
The Supreme Court on Friday backed a federal law that would effectively ban the popular app from operating in the United States. The decision means that the app could be banned as soon as Sunday. How that might play out for TikTok’s roughly 170 million U.S. users isn’t yet clear. But it may soon be difficult, if not impossible, for users to scroll to their heart’s content.
“I WONT SURVIVE I FEAR,” one user wrote in a video caption. “How will I ever laugh again?” wrote another.
The videos about TikTok “withdrawal” aren’t all serious. But some users, like Ms. Kalata, say they do genuinely feel addicted — and some experts who study social media use say that may be true, to an extent.
“TikTok is actually a very good example of having an addictive design,” said Dr. Isaac Vaghefi, an assistant professor at the Baruch College Zicklin School of Business who studies social media. He rattled off several features that keep users coming back for more: a never-ending feed of content, short videos that command attention, and a highly effective, personalized “For You” algorithm.
TikTok has said its app has several features in place to help users manage their screen time, including scheduled screen time breaks and daily screen time limits.
“Everything on my For You is pretty much content that I want to watch,” said Brandon Gapultos, an accountant in Glendora, Calif. Mr. Gapultos, 29, spends more than two and a half hours on TikTok every day, he said, often watching day-in-the-life posts about other people’s work lives.
The videos “give me something to relate to,” he said, “and get me through the day.”
Breaking a TikTok Habit
“Social media addiction” isn’t a formal medical diagnosis. But experts generally agree that some people develop “problematic usage of social media,” said Dr. Marc Potenza, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who specializes in addiction. Scientists don’t fully understand why that happens, but some research suggests that social media usage activates the parts of the brain that respond to pleasurable experiences, called the reward pathway.
Dr. Potenza said there are some telltale signs that your TikTok habit could be problematic — if you prioritize using the app over eating, sleeping or working, for example, or if you feel compelled to open the app throughout the day. Some people might feel on edge or crave watching videos when they don’t have access, he added.
Another red flag is “a loss of control” over how long you use the app, said Dr. Michael Tsappis, co-director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Lisi German, 17, a high school student in Ladera Ranch, Calif., said she spends at least an hour and a half on TikTok every day. Ms. German, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, said her urge to scroll on the app made it even harder to manage her time and get homework done. Sometimes, she said, she thinks she’s been on TikTok for just 10 minutes — but she’ll soon realize it’s been an hour.
Research suggests that those with mental health conditions such as A.D.H.D., anxiety and depression may be more likely to overindulge in social media, Dr. Tsappis said, but anyone is susceptible to problematic use.
For the millions of TikTok users in the United States, losing access could lead to feelings of anxiety or irritability as they adjust to life without an app they used often, said Dr. Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. But experts said that a ban could also present an opportunity for people to re-examine social media’s role in their lives.
Ms. Kalata, who has about 31,000 followers on the platform, has done just that. She won’t try to move her following somewhere else — ideally, she would like to get off social media altogether.
“But since I’m already so obsessed with TikTok,” she said, “I feel like that’ll be hard.”
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David E. Sanger writes often about cyberthreats and the intersection of new technology and government efforts to control them.
For five years now, American officials have insisted that TikTok poses a grave national security threat — even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lay out the evidence.
But as the case came before the Supreme Court last Friday, pitting the government’s powers to protect the country against perceived threats against users who claim their First Amendment rights would be impinged by an effective ban on the app in the country, the environment of cyberthreats had changed dramatically.
The Biden administration has accused China’s main intelligence services of burrowing deep inside the American utility grid and, more recently, into the complex networks run by nine of the country’s telecommunications firms. The first operation, they contend, is designed to give Chinese authorities the capability to turn off electric power or water pipelines in case of a military confrontation over Taiwan. And the second operation, called Salt Typhoon, has enabled Chinese intelligence agents to listen in on some phone calls and even get inside the government’s system for conducting surveillance of suspected spies.
Neither of those operations involved the TikTok app. But the fear inside the National Security Agency and the U.S. military, among others, is that the app itself could give a new pathway to sophisticated Chinese cyber-actors — which is why the app is banned from government phones.
So the very idea that more than 170 million Americans have voluntarily installed the TikTok app — and increasingly use it to absorb news as well as dance videos and other entertainment — drives most cyber-savvy senior government officials in the Biden administration crazy.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, until recently the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared TikTok could become “the most powerful propaganda tool ever.” As one exiting senior official described the problem, why go to work every day to pull suspect Chinese malware out of the nation’s telecommunications system when a majority of Americans are happily going to the App Store and installing Chinese computer code, of mysterious origin, directly onto their iPhones and Androids?
But sorting out the threat — and what the government is really worried about — has not been easy. Even in classified sessions, members of Congress say, the “TikTok threat” has only been described in the vaguest of terms. There is no smoking gun, no clear-cut case of the Chinese government’s exploiting the app to, say, influence an election or track the movement of key intelligence targets. (There have been some specific cases in which TikTok developers in China could gain access to personal information on Americans.)
So the argument about the risk has typically been described in hypothetical terms: The government fears that under Chinese law, TikTok executives could be ordered to let disinformation seep into the app, and thus deep into the cerebral cortexes of several generations of Americans. In its arguments to the court, the government made the case that because TikTok collects so much data on its users — their interests, their preferences, sometimes even their geolocation — that China could use the data for “espionage or blackmail” or to “advance its geopolitical interests” by “sowing discord and disinformation during a crisis.”
The Supreme Court has usually given a fair bit of leeway to the government to assess national security threats. And the government’s core argument is that the only way to mitigate the threat is to take the writing of the code for the TikTok app out of the hands of engineers working for ByteDance, the Chinese company that controls the platform and that develops the code in enormous secrecy in laboratories around the world. Instead, it would move to American soil, presumably out of the reach of China’s ministry of state security.
That would not be a guarantee of course. If the China’s intelligence services can pierce the AT&T and Verizon networks, along with those of seven other telecommunications firms, how hard could it be to bore into a TikTok system that Chinese engineers designed? So in the end, the United States wants to do far more than simply separate the making of TikTok’s magic sauce from Chinese control. They want an early-warning system if the app is ever being manipulated.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says in a statement that President Biden’s position that TikTok should be available to Americans, but under ownership that mitigates the national security concerns, has “been clear for months.” She says that “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.”
On TikTok, some users are livestreaming the court’s decision for thousands of viewers, unpacking the ruling that could potentially impact their livelihoods. There is a sense of frustration and sadness from many those watching. “Is everybody on RedNote?” one livestreamer asked his followers, referencing a Chinese-owned video app that has become popular in recent days in light of the looming ban.
Everybody might be on RedNote. Looking for an alternative to TikTok this week, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States have gotten onto Xiaohongshu, also called RedNote, one of China’s most popular social media apps. Xiaohongshu was little known outside of China until this week, and has been the most downloaded free app in the U.S. Apple store since Tuesday.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident-elect Donald J. Trump said in a post this morning on Truth Social, his social media platform, that he had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping about a number of topics, including TikTok. Trump has signaled he would like to keep it operating in the United States.
The government offered two main justifications for the law: preventing China from covertly manipulating content on the platform, and preventing China from collecting vast amounts of data about the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. The court’s opinion rests on the data collection rationale, which it stresses is a “content neutral” justification.
The importance of the court finding that the data collection rationale is sufficient to uphold the law is that content-neutral restrictions on speech get an easier First Amendment test than restrictions aimed at particular content. Under that test, if restrictions advance an important governmental interest and don’t burden speech more than necessary, the court will uphold them — as it did here.
The ruling was a “per curiam,” meaning it was on behalf of the court as a whole and does not have an identified author. Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a concurring opinion that agreed with the result and most of the analysis, but objected to a section about the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch also filed a concurring opinion that made some additional observations.
TikTok faces a U.S. ban as soon as Sunday, a move that could have sweeping consequences for the social media landscape, popular culture, and millions of influencers and small businesses that rely on the platform to earn a living.
Here’s what you need to know.
Why is TikTok facing a ban?
U.S. officials have long been concerned that the Chinese government could manipulate content or gain access to sensitive user data through TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Those fears prompted Congress to pass legislation that would ban the social media platform unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer within 270 days.
Who is responsible for the law?
The concerns about TikTok have been bipartisan. The law was crafted in secret by a small group of lawmakers and congressional staff members last year. The Biden administration helped them write the legislation and sent national security officials to brief lawmakers about the threat from TikTok. The House overwhelmingly approved the bill, and it passed the Senate as part of a package that included aid for Ukraine and Israel. President Biden signed it into law in April.
What happens next?
The law doesn’t ban TikTok directly if ByteDance is unable or unwilling to sell the app. Instead, it says that app stores, like those operated by Apple and Google, and cloud providers like Oracle cannot distribute the app.
For violating the law, those companies face penalties as high as $5,000 per user who is able to access the app. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the United States — so the fines could add up quickly.
Is there any chance to save TikTok?
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering an executive order to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States.
But it’s unclear if an executive order by Mr. Trump could effectively halt a ban. Legal experts said he could direct the Justice Department not to enforce the law, or delay enforcement for a set period, but how such an executive order would fare if challenged in court is uncertain.
Another possible way to halt a ban would be to find a buyer, allowing the president to extend the deadline by 90 days. The law says a viable deal must be on the table, but no clear buyers have emerged. On Thursday, some lawmakers urged Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump to extend the deadline anyway.
TikTok has claimed that a sale is impossible because TikTok is a global operation, and China has already signaled it would block the export of its all-important video-recommendation technology.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Supreme Court has upheld a law that effectively bans TikTok in the United States unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the company.
The decision comes mere days after the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold the law effectively banning TikTok, even though several justices expressed concerns that the law was in tension with the First Amendment,
During arguments on Friday a majority of the justices appeared satisfied that the law was aimed not at TikTok’s speech rights but rather at its ownership, which the government says is controlled by China.
The government offered two rationales for the law: combating covert disinformation from China and barring it from harvesting private information about Americans. The court was divided over the first justification. But several justices seemed troubled by the possibility that China could use data culled from the app for espionage or blackmail.
“Congress and the president were concerned,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said, “that China was accessing information about millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, including teenagers, people in their 20s.”
That data, he added, could be used “over time to develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people, people who a generation from now will be working in the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. or in the State Department.”
Noel J. Francisco, a lawyer for TikTok, said he did not dispute those risks. But he said the government could address them by means short of effectively ordering the app to, as he put it, “go dark.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. appeared unpersuaded.
“Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” Chief Justice Roberts asked.
Reporting from Washington
The Supreme Court ruled against TikTok on Friday rejecting the company’s First Amendment challenge to a law that effectively bans it starting on Sunday.
The unanimous decision may deal a death blow to the U.S. operations of the wildly popular app, which serves up short-form videos that are a leading source of information and entertainment to 170 million Americans, especially younger ones.
“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,” the decision said. “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.
In accepting the government’s arguments that China’s control of TikTok’s corporate parent poses a threat to the nation’s security, the court ruled that Congress was entitled to put its owners to the choice between selling it or letting it go dark.
The decision, delivered on an exceptionally abbreviated schedule, has few rivals in the annals of important First Amendment precedents and in the vast practical impact it will have.
Although TikTok’s lawyer told the justices last week that the app would “go dark” if it lost the case, it was not clear how quickly a shutdown would play out. At a minimum, it appeared likely that app store operators like Apple and Google would stop distributing and updating the TikTok app for fear of significant penalties imposed by the law.
The decision landed days before the potential ban was set to take effect and before President-elect Donald J. Trump was to be inaugurated.
Mr. Trump had asked the justices to temporarily block the law so that he could address the matter after he assumed office.
Recently, Mr. Trump had explored the possibility of an executive order that could allow TikTok to keep operating despite the pending ban. It remains unclear whether the tactic would withstand legal challenges or even how such an order would work.
The law allows the president to extend the deadline for 90 days in limited circumstances, but the provision does not appear to apply, as it requires him to certify to Congress that there has been significant progress toward a sale backed by “relevant binding legal agreements.”
Mr. Trump’s show of support for the app was a remarkable reversal from just four years ago, when he vowed to block TikTok and tried to force its sale. That rapport will be on display on Monday at the inauguration, where TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, is expected to be a guest, invited to sit in a position of honor on the dais where former presidents, family members and other important guests traditionally assemble.
When the case was argued last Friday, the Biden administration’s lawyer told the court that any ban did not need to be permanent and that TikTok could start operating again if it were sold after the deadline.
In court papers, though, the company said it would sustain severe damage from even a brief pause in operations.
“If the platform becomes unavailable on Jan. 19,” its brief said, “TikTok will lose its users and creators in the United States. Many current and would-be users and creators — both domestically and abroad — will migrate to competing platforms, and many will never return even if the ban is later lifted.”
President Biden signed the law last spring after it was enacted with wide bipartisan support. Lawmakers said the app’s ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies allowed it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread covert disinformation or propaganda
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in early December rejected a challenge to the law brought by TikTok, its parent company, ByteDance, and several American users, ruling that the measure was justified by national security concerns. The judges differed somewhat in their reasoning but were united in accepting the government’s arguments that the Chinese government could exploit the site to harm national security.
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