Supreme Court Justices Are Leaning Towards A TikTok Ban

The Supreme Court Justices have signaled they are likely to uphold the TikTok ban signed into law by President Biden in April. The law requires Chinese-owned company ByteDance to completely divest from the app—or be banned in the United States on January 19.

TikTok appeared before the Supreme Court for oral arguments, but received a rather frosty reception from the justices. They asked several piercing questions intended to probe TikTok’s First Amendment defense, while asking other questions about media owners including Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post, Elon Musk’s X/(Twitter), and Politico’s German publisher, Axel Springer SE.

“Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok,” Chief Justice John Roberts told TikTok’s attorneys. “They don’t care about the expression. That’s shown by the remedy. They’re not saying TikTok has to stop. They’re saying the Chinese have to stop controlling TikTok. So it’s not a direct burden on the expression at all,” Roberts continued. TikTok’s attorneys are seeking to argue that 170 million users losing access to TikTok is a violation of their free speech.

At the core of the argument is whether or not national security concerns supersede free speech concerns raised by TikTok and its creators. The alarm on TikTok’s data collection policies has been slowly flashing a bright red for nearly four years now. Digital Music News has cataloged how the app was caught snooping full access to a user’s clipboard and continually accessing location information. The U.S. Navy was the first branch of the U.S. military to ban the app due to data collection concerns. The Army soon followed, with both branches of Congress following.

“Just on the data collection, that seems like a huge concern for the future of the country,” Justice Kavanaugh said, stating the the data collection amounted to shadow profiles that could be used to “develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people—people who a generation from now will be working in the FBI, CIA, or the State Department.”

“This law was passed by broad bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, and our legislators don’t always agree on everything,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Court. “I think it’s unlikely that all of them had exactly the same views about what’s ‘good content’ on TikTok or what are ‘good viewpoints.’ They weren’t united on that.”

“What they were united around was the idea that it is a grave threat to our nation if the [People’s Republic of China] can itself behind the scenes—be controlling how this platform operates,” she continues.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s attorneys brought up Trump’s petition to the Supreme Court seeking a temporary pause on the ban until after his inauguration. President Trump was the first president to lead calls for a ban on TikTok back in 2020, but the soon-to-be second-term president has been kinder to the platform since joining it. He told his 15 million followers, “vote for me and I’ll save TikTok.”

Should the Supreme Court allow the ban to go into effect, it will happen on July 19. TikTok will be banned from U.S. app stores and ISPs will have to block access to the web app. Lawmakers have already informed Apple and Google they should be ready to comply with the new law in the coming weeks.