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TikTok’s future hangs on a Supreme Court battle set to take place on Friday.
The social media giant and its parent company, ByteDance, are scheduled to face off against the US government in a hearing to decide whether the Chinese company can maintain control of the popular US app.
The nation's highest court took up appeals filed by TikTok and a group of its users after an appeals court unanimously rejected their claims that a federal law mandating divestment of the popular social media app was unconstitutional on free speech grounds.
TikTok is asking the high court to block enforcement of the law signed by President Joe Biden that effectively bans the app on Jan. 19 unless it is sold to an owner not controlled by China, North Korea, Russia, or Iran.
The high court could issue a decision before Trump is sworn into office on Jan. 20 or put the law on hold pending further instruction.
The case will test Congress’s power to prioritize US national security over the speech of a US company controlled by a foreign adversary and over the expressions of US citizens made on the company’s platform.
The blockbuster case will also have dramatic implications for the 170 million American smartphone users as well as some of the biggest technology companies in the US.
A ruling from the Supreme Court to uphold the ban could be a long-term boon for TikTok's social media rivals by redistributing advertising dollars to platforms like Meta (META), according to Mark Lightner, head of special situations legal research for CreditSights, an independent credit research firm.
TikTok's millions of users, especially small business owners, are worried about whether they'll be able to continue to create content on the platform or save their content if the app is shuttered, according to Pepperdine University media and intellectual property law professor Victoria Schwartz.
"In terms of content, under TikTok's licensing agreements, the intellectual property belongs to its content creators," Schwartz said.
Account holders who want to keep their content, she said, should have a plan in place to back up all of that content. "It doesn't do any good if you own intellectual property rights and it's stored only somewhere in the TikTok universe."
According to TikTok and its users, the law passed last year by Congress — called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — violates the Constitution's First Amendment protections.
The government claims the law is “entirely consistent” with the First Amendment and that ByteDance, a foreign entity operating abroad, nonetheless lacks First Amendment protection.