The looming TikTok ban is barely a week away and the company is running out of time to do anything about it. On Friday, the Supreme Court heard last-minute arguments about the ban, with TikTok angling for an intervention or, at least, a temporary ruling to buy a bit more time. They didn’t go especially well for TikTok — even justices who sounded sympathetic to the company’s arguments about free speech seemed satisfied by the government’s core national security argument.
As a matter of law, in other words, it’s looking like the ban is going to happen, and probably right before Donald Trump once again takes office. This is a completely unprecedented event — a massively popular app with a major cultural and economic footprint in the United States might just get switched off — but also something that the incoming President, who effectively originated the ban in the form of an executive order in 2020, but who since became aware that some people on the app actually like him and also raised a bunch of money from one of its biggest American investors, now says he doesn’t want to happen.
The court was concerned, mostly, with the substance of the law, which requires that TikTok either be sold to an American company or banned entirely, but the justices did briefly touch on the urgent question of what might practically happen next, in the real world. Congress passed a law. Trump can say he doesn’t support it, but it’s still on the books, and it passed with substantial bipartisan support. If he really wants to stop it he’ll have to do something about it, and the available options are all pretty messy.
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