Supreme Court may announce opinions Friday as decision on TikTok ban looms

Washington — The Supreme Court said Thursday that it may announce opinions on Friday morning, a last-minute addition to the schedule that comes just two days before a law that would ban TikTok is set to go into effect.

“The Court may announce opinions on the homepage beginning at 10 a.m.,” a notice on the court’s website said, without specifying what case or cases might be decided. “The Court will not take the Bench.”

The law would cut TikTok off from U.S. app stores and hosting services if it does not cut ties with its China-based parent company, ByteDance, before the Jan. 19 deadline. 

The Supreme Court seemed likely to upload the law when it heard arguments over TikTok’s legal challenge last week, with the justices seeming sympathetic to the government’s claims that China could use TikTok to collect a vast amount of data on its American users and spy on them.

Noel Francisco, who argued on behalf of TikTok and ByteDance, said the potential Supreme Court decision is “enormously consequential” for the platform’s 170 million users in the U.S. and their free speech rights. 

If the law is not paused or overturned by Sunday, “we go dark,” Francisco said last week. “The platform shuts down,” he said, later clarifying that TikTok would no longer be available in U.S. app stores. 

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the “unprecedented amounts” of personal data collected by TikTok would give the Chinese government “a powerful tool for harassment, recruitment and espionage.” She cited several data breaches that the U.S. has attributed to China over the last decade, including the hack of the Office of Personnel Management that compromised the personal information of millions of federal employees.

“For years, the Chinese government has sought to build detailed profiles about Americans, where we live and work, who our friends and coworkers are, what our interests are and what our vices are,” Pregolar said. 

In April, Congress swiftly passed the bipartisan legislation, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, as part of a foreign aid package, and it was signed into law by President Biden. It gave TikTok nine months to sever ties with its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, with the possibility of a 90-day extension if a sale were in progress by the January deadline. Absent a sale, TikTok loses access to app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S. 

Lawmakers and intelligence agencies have long had suspicions about the app’s ties to China and have argued that the concerns are warranted because Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering. 

TikTok and ByteDance filed a legal challenge in May that called the law “an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” based on “speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation” that would suppress the speech of millions of Americans. 

A federal appeals court issued a ruling in December that upheld the law, saying the U.S. government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” A week later, the appeals court denied TikTok’s bid to delay the law from taking effect, pending a Supreme Court review.  

On Dec. 16, TikTok asked the Supreme Court for a temporary pause, saying it would suffer “immediate irreparable harm” if the high court did not delay the ban. Two days later, the Supreme Court said it would take up the challenge to the law under an expedited timeline. 

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