Supreme Court may decide Friday if TikTok will be banned
The high court doesn't announce which opinions it is releasing. But the justices are up against a Sunday deadline for TikTok to cut ties with China.
WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court could announce the fate of TikTok Friday morning, two days before the popular video app could be effectively banned in the U.S. without the court's intervention.
Although the justices are not scheduled to take the bench, the court said on its website Thursday it may release an opinion electronically at 10 a.m. EST Friday.
The court does not announce in advance which cases its deciding. But the justices are up against a Sunday deadline Congress set last year when passing a law requiring TikTok to cut ties with China.
Unless TikTok divests from ByteDance, its China-based parent company, app stores and internet hosting services can be fined for supporting TikTok.
The high court could put the law on hold, could decline to intervene for now or could definitively rule on whether the law is constitutional.
The justices seemed likely to uphold the law when it debated the issue for about 2½ hours last week.
"Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?" Chief Justice John Roberts asked TikTok's attorney.
If the court backs the law, attention will turn to President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first administration, has since promised to “save” the wildly popular platform, though it's unclear how he could do so.
The art-of-the-deal president-elect had urged the Supreme Court to pause the ban to give him time to "negotiate a resolution."
If the court lets the deadline stand, Trump could direct his attorney general not to enforce the law after he takes office on Monday. But it's uncertain if Apple, Google and any other conduits for the app will feel that’s enough protection from the law’s stiff penalties.
The Justice Department has said Trump should review all the updated national security information since he was last in office before stepping in.
The government warned that unless TikTok is divested from ByteDance, China can gather data on Americans or manipulate the content on TikTok to shape U.S. opinion.
"The Chinese government's control of TikTok poses a grave threat to national security," Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court last week.
TikTok disputed that China can pull its strings and called the sell-or-be-banned requirement a "massive, unprecedented restriction" on free speech.
"One of America's most popular speech platforms will shut down in nine days," Noel Francisco, an attorney for TikTok who served as solicitor general during Trump's first administration, told the justices on Jan. 10. "That shouldn't happen."