TikTok’s US saga is almost at an end, and its last major source of hope—a Supreme Court intervention—now looks unlikely to pan out. Thus, a January 19 ban in the US is looking more realistic than ever. Here’s the latest.
Supreme Court appears unlikely to stop TikTok ban
Today, the US Supreme Court heard more than two hours of arguments concerning TikTok’s impending ban.
The general consensus from observers? The ban appears likely to be upheld.
While the Supreme Court has not yet issued a ruling, the hearing provided plenty of data that indicates the ban won’t be stopped by the country’s highest court of law.
Most of the justices homed in Friday on one central point: The law would allow TikTok to keep operating if it used an algorithm other than ByteDance’s. And ByteDance, as a Chinese company, doesn’t have First Amendment rights.
Ann Marimow writes at The Washington Post:
a majority of justices seemed to embrace Congress’s national security concerns about the ability of the Chinese government to harvest the sensitive data of millions of American users and to potentially use that information to blackmail young Americans or turn them into spies.
If the TikTok ban is allowed to proceed, then as TikTok’s legal representative, Noel Francisco, said during the hearing, the app ‘will go dark’ in the US on January 19.
What happens then is anyone’s guess.
President-elect Trump has indicated that he wants to stop the ban, so it’s possible after his January 20 inauguration we’ll see movement on that front.
But if nothing else changes, TikTok’s time in the US could be coming to an end soon.
What’s your take on the TikTok ban? Let us know in the comments.
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