Supreme Court upholds law potentially banning TikTok

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that would ban the social media app TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance didn’t divest itself of the platform by Sunday, Jan. 19. Attorneys representing TikTok appeared before the court last week, arguing to the justices that the law infringed on the First Amendment rights of the platform and its users.

Why did the court uphold the ban? The Supreme Court acknowledged that TikTok provided more than half of the U.S. population an outlet for free expression. But it also acknowledged that the U.S. government had good reason to believe the app’s connections to China threatened national security. Requiring the company to cut its ties with a hostile foreign government or else be banned did not violate the company's or the users’ freedom of speech. 

Dig deeper: Read my report in the Sift about the oral arguments surrounding the ban last week.