The high court considered the social media platform’s emergency request to pause a law requiring it to sever Chinese ties.
U.S. Supreme Court justices seemed skeptical of TikTok’s request to halt a federal law requiring indirect owner ByteDance to divest itself of the company by Jan. 19 or cease U.S. operations.
Their comments came on Jan. 10 in a dramatic legal showdown nine days before the law is scheduled to take effect. Oral argument took place in TikTok Inc. v. Garland and its companion case, Firebaugh v. Garland.
President-elect Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on Jan. 20 and is himself a social media entrepreneur, filed a brief asking the justices to stay the law to give him an opportunity to develop a political solution when he returns to the White House.
Trump was not represented by an attorney at the hearing and his position on the case was not discussed at length.
According to the emergency application filed by TikTok, in 2023, there were about 170 million monthly U.S. users of the platform who uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos that received upward of 13 trillion views, half of which occurred outside the United States. That same year, users viewed content originating from abroad more than 2.7 trillion times.
President Joe Biden, who leaves office days from now, signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act on April 24, 2024, after it was passed by bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate.
TikTok is operated in the United States by TikTok Inc., a U.S. company that Cayman Islands-based ByteDance Ltd. owns indirectly.
TikTok acknowledges that ByteDance owns subsidiaries in China and other nations but denies Chinese influence in its operations.
Echoing criticism of TikTok expressed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the law expresses national security-related concerns that the Chinese regime may access and abuse the personal data of American TikTok users, using it to seek strategic advantage over the United States and disseminate propaganda.
The statute requires TikTok Inc. to separate itself from ByteDance by Jan. 19—the day before Trump will be inaugurated—or stop operating in the United States.
