TikTok could shut off for United States-based users on Sunday, should the Supreme Court decide not to block a law that would otherwise ban the social media app, according to Reuters and The Information. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — the so-called TikTok ban — is constitutional, and is expected to release its decision this week. Should the Supreme Court deem the ban constitutional, it would become illegal for app stores and internet services to distribute or host TikTok, and potentially other apps deemed a threat as controlled by a “foreign adversary”; companies that defy this would face high fines. NBC News has suggested the justices are poised to uphold the ban.
Should the app go offline on Sunday, TikTok users attempting to open the app will find a pop-up message leading them to a website with information about the ban, per Reuters citing “people familiar with the matter.” If the ban got reversed after the initial decision, Reuters said, TikTok would be restored “in a relatively short time.”
Given TikTok’s reported readiness to pull the app offline, it feels increasingly unlikely that owner ByteDance will sell the app ahead of the deadline. The TikTok ban hinges on that: Legislators are pressuring the company to sell to an American company to keep it running in the U.S. The purported goal for the law is to keep Americans safe from “foreign adversaries” like China. ByteDance is a Chinese-owned company.
However, U.S. TikTok users don’t seem too concerned by the supposed risk of using a Chinese app. In the lead-up to the Jan. 19 deadline, TikTok users have flocked to Chinese social media apps like Lemon8 and Xiaohongshu (called RedNote in English). These apps aren’t exact TikTok clones, but function similarly, allowing users to post shortform video content alongside microblogs and photo posts. Of course, it’s unknown how long these apps could be available to U.S. citizens. Owned by Chinese companies (Lemon8 is a ByteDance app), the law could apply to them, too.
