Supreme Court may decide Friday if TikTok will be banned

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. 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.

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TikTok educational influencer Tiffany Cianci livestreams outside the Supreme Court as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.

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 two-and-a-half hours last week.

President-elect Donald Trump.

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Russell Ellis, who goes by "JollyGoodGinger," speaks to a live stream audience outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the court heard oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on Jan. 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.

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.”

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“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.”