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CNN
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The fate of TikTok in the United States is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. And things don’t look good for the app.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday on the law that could ban TikTok in the United States. The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, requires TikTok to be sold by its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a US ban.
The hearing did not seem to go well for TikTok, making it more likely than ever that the ban will go into effect starting January 19. Most of the justices appear likely to uphold the law, asking tough questions of lawyers for TikTok and its users about the merits of their argument that the law violates the First Amendment.
There are many lingering questions about how the ban would work in practice, because there is no precedent for the US government blocking a major social media platform. And much of how the government plans to implement it remains unclear.
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy If TikTok is banned, what happens to creators and fans?
TikTok is facing an imminent ban in the United States. The company will make a final attempt to argue its case before the Supreme Court on Friday; if lost, the law forcing TikTok to break away from its China-based parent company or be banned in the United States would take effect on January 19. Does this mean the app will disappear from users’ phones overnight? Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains what the ban would look like for users, in practical terms. And influencers Eli Rallo and Joanne Molinaro, aka The Korean Vegan, share what it means for people who make a living from the app. What questions do you have about technology in your life? Email us at CNNTermsofService@Gmail.com.
January 7, 2025 • 22 min
Even TikTok’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, seemed unsure how exactly a ban would land. “On January 19, as I understand it, we closed,” he said.
Beyond being unavailable in app stores, “what the act says is that all other types of service providers can’t even provide service,” Francisco said. “So basically what they’re going to say is, I think, ‘we’re not going to provide the services necessary to get you to see it.’ So basically it’s going to stop working. I think that’s a consequence of this law.”
TikTok itself said in its emergency Supreme Court filing that unless the court blocks the law, it “will go into effect on January 19, 2025, shutting down TikTok for its more than 170 million US monthly users.”
But some things are clear, including the fact that TikTok won’t suddenly disappear from existing users’ phones.
Here’s what we know about how a ban would work.
Technically, TikTok could take the ball and go home, blocking access to the app for its own US users, as a way to reprimand the US government and strengthen its negotiating position with the support of millions of angry young people, without Their beloved TikTok. But given how hard it fought to avoid a ban, it’s more likely that the US government will have to act to enforce the law.
The US government is widely expected to force app store operators such as Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their platforms.
This means that new users will not be able to download it. Existing US TikTok users can still use the app on their phones, but they won’t be able to update it via app stores, meaning the company won’t be able to fix bugs or security holes. And each of these can add up, eventually making the app difficult—if not impossible—to use.
“Potentially, vulnerabilities will become known in the app and hackers will take advantage of those vulnerabilities to compromise your account or your device,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNN’s Terms of Service podcast. .
.However, it may be weeks or months before existing users see their app experience degraded.
The government can also compel US Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which to provide access to the Internet and websites on them, to block TikTok, making it impossible to access the web version of the platform. But that approach would be complicated, Galperin said, because there are many more ISPs than app stores.
Regardless of the exact path the government takes to block TikTok, there will almost certainly be ways around it, for example, using a virtual private network or VPN. A VPN is a program that anyone can download that can hide location data and make it appear as if the user is accessing the Internet from another country.
“Many other countries have blocked social media apps and websites in the past using a variety of different methods, with a very wide range of results and levels of effectiveness,” Galperin said. “In Turkey, for example, many social media sites have been blocked for years, and having a VPN that bypasses that censorship is something that almost every person in Turkey does.”
Even if the ban takes effect, it is not necessarily permanent. ByteDance would still have the option to sell the platform to a non-Chinese owner to restore access to US users.
And there are willing buyers. A group created by billionaire Frank McCourt and backed by celebrity Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary said Thursday they made a formal offer to ByteDance to buy TikTok’s US assets, although the company has repeatedly said the app does not is for sale.
“When push comes to shove and these restrictions go into effect, I think it will fundamentally change the landscape in terms of what ByteDance is willing to consider,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court on Friday, who argued for the government. “It may just be the shock that Congress expected the company would have to move forward with the sale process.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s promises to save TikTok have also added to uncertainty about how a ban would play out.
Ahead of Friday’s Supreme Court hearing, Trump filed a brief asking the court to temporarily halt enforcement of the ban — currently set to begin the day before his inauguration — to give him time, as president, to negotiate a sale of TikTok.
Legal experts have also suggested that Trump could simply choose not to enforce the law and signal to Apple and Google that they will not be fined for continuing to host the app on their platforms.
“It’s possible that from January 20, 21, 22, we could be in a different world,” Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, said Friday, referring to the change in administration.
However, it is not clear that those companies would be willing to break the letter of the law, even with a guarantee from Trump.
“I’m a little concerned that a suggestion that the president-elect or anyone else wouldn’t enforce the law, when a law is in place and prohibits a certain action, that a company would choose to ignore enforcement for any guarantee other than a change in that law”, liberal–Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during the hearing. “Whatever the new president does, it doesn’t change that reality for these companies.”
