The Supreme Court on Friday grappled over a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular social media platform that has about 170 million users.
Congress enacted the law out of concern that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to the influence of the Chinese government and posed a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by Jan. 19.
Here are some key takeaways:
The court appeared likely to uphold the law.
While the justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law.
The questioning opened with two conservative members of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., suggesting that it was not TikTok, an American company, but its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, that was directly affected by the law.
Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, focused on the risk that the Chinese government could use information TikTok is gathering on tens of millions of American teenagers and twentysomethings to eventually “develop spies, turn people, blackmail people” when they grow older and go to work for national security agencies or the military.
Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, asked why TikTok could not just create or buy another algorithm rather than using ByteDance’s.