A sale does not appear imminent and, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users’ phones once the law takes effect, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

The decision came against the backdrop of unusual political agitation by President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed that he could negotiate a solution, and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has signaled it won’t enforce the law — which was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support — beginning Sunday, his final full day in office.

“TikTok should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress in developing this law,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement, noting that actions to implement the law will fall to the new administration.

Trump, mindful of TikTok’s popularity, and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, finds himself on the opposite side of the argument from prominent Senate Republicans who fault TikTok’s Chinese owner for not finding a buyer before now. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision was issued that TikTok was among the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration, used the app to thank the incoming president for “his commitment to work with us to keep TikTok available.”

It’s unclear what options are open to Trump, a Republican, once he is sworn in as president on Monday. The law allowed for a 90-day pause in the restrictions on the app if there had been progress toward a sale before it took effect. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the law at the Supreme Court for the Democratic Biden administration, told the justices last week that it’s uncertain whether the prospect of a sale once the law is in effect could trigger a 90-day respite for TikTok.

The decision explores the intersection of the First Amendment and national security concerns in the fast-changing realm of social media, and the justices acknowledged in their opinion that the new terrain has been difficult to navigate given they know relatively little about it.

“Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, adding that the law “does not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed short separate opinions noting some reservations about the court’s decision but going along with the outcome.

“Without doubt, the remedy Congress and the President chose here is dramatic,” Gorsuch wrote. Still, he said he was persuaded by the argument that China could get access to “vast troves of personal information about tens of millions of Americans.”

Some digital rights groups slammed the court’s ruling shortly after it was released.

“Today’s unprecedented decision upholding the TikTok ban harms the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in this country and around the world,” said Kate Ruane, a director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which has supported TikTok’s challenge to the federal law.

Content creators who opposed the law also worried about the effect on their business if TikTok shuts down. “I’m very, very concerned about what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks,” said Desiree Hill, owner of Crown’s Corner mechanic shop in Conyers, Georgia. “And very scared about the decrease that I’m going to have in reaching customers and worried I’m going to potentially lose my business in the next six months.”

At arguments, the justices were told by a lawyer for TikTok and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese technology company that is its parent, how difficult it would be to consummate a deal, especially since Chinese law restricts the sale of the proprietary algorithm that has made the social media platform wildly successful.

The app allows users to watch hundreds of videos in about half an hour because some are only a few seconds long, according to a lawsuit filed last year by Kentucky complaining that TikTok is designed to be addictive and harms kids’ mental health. Similar suits were filed by more than a dozen states. TikTok has called the claims inaccurate.

The dispute over TikTok’s ties to China has come to embody the geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing.

“ByteDance and its Chinese Communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before the Sunday deadline,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on X. “The very fact that Communist China refuses to permit its sale reveals exactly what TikTok is: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court correctly rejected TikTok’s lies and propaganda masquerading as legal arguments.”

The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.

TikTok points out the U.S. has not presented evidence that China has attempted to manipulate content on its U.S. platform or gather American user data through TikTok.

Biden signed the legislation it into law in April. The law was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over TikTok, which the government sees as a national security threat.

TikTok, which sued the government last year over the law, has long denied it could be used as a tool of Beijing. A three-judge panel made up of two Republican appointees and a Democratic appointee unanimously upheld the law in December, prompting TikTok’s quick appeal to the Supreme Court.

Without a sale to an approved buyer, the law bars app stores operated by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok beginning on Sunday. Internet hosting services also will be prohibited from hosting TikTok.

ByteDance has said it won’t sell. But some investors have been eyeing it, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt. McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative has said it and its unnamed partners have presented a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets. The consortium, which includes “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary, did not disclose the financial terms of the offer.

McCourt, in a statement following the ruling, said his group was “ready to work with the company and President Trump to complete a deal.”

Prelogar told the justices last week that having the law take effect “might be just the jolt” ByteDance needs to reconsider its position.

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But last week they stood on the floor of the California Assembly and persuaded their colleagues to advance legislation that would have California join a handful of conservative states in passing laws requiring pornography sites to verify the ages of visitors to ensure they’re adults. 

“This bill is not about harming the adult entertainment industry or attacking those that work for it,” said Alanis, a former crimes-against-children detective. “This bill is simply about protecting children – and the harmful exposure to increasingly available and increasingly violent sexual material online.”

Bauer-Kahan, a leading women’s rights advocate in the Legislature, told her Assembly colleagues that research shows 40% of college-aged women have reported being choked during sexual encounters, something she said their partners learned from watching porn. 

“We may think this is a purity issue, but it goes well beyond that,” she said. “It is about the safety of our children. It is about making sure that they learn healthy behaviors.”

Their arguments resonated. None of the 80 members of the Assembly voted against Alanis’s Assembly Bill 3080, though 15 were listed as not voting. As CalMatters reported, lawmakers regularly decline to vote to avoid going on record against a controversial bill. 

Under the bill, porn sites would need to take “reasonable steps” to verify a user is an adult, such as using age-verification software or having the user provide the site a credit card or government-issued ID. The bill would require that any data collection would ensure the user’s anonymity and would not be used to create a record of the user’s online activity.

The bill now moves to the Senate. There, the Democrat-controlled chamber is likely to hear testimony from the same parents rights and church groups, free speech advocates and porn producers who testified last month before the Assembly’s judiciary and consumer protection and privacy committees.

Porn stars, conservative family groups orgs testify

Joseph Kohm, director of public policy at the Colorado-based Family Policy Alliance, told the Assembly Judiciary Committee last month that children regularly visit online porn sites featuring sexual violence and verbal degredation.

“And what this means is that they are learning about sexuality from a perspective that portrays sex as physical abuse,” Kohm told the committee.

Free speech advocates countered that if California enacted the bill, it would stifle the First Amendment rights of adult Californians to access online porn. Members of the porn industry also testified it would reduce traffic to their sites if the restrictions are enacted as they have been in other states.

“It’s a customer deterrent,” queer porn performer Jiz Lee told the judiciary committee. “And if it was enacted in California, where a lot of our subscribers are based, it would hurt our business.”

Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry trade group, told the judiciary committee that less than 1% of pornsite users actually complete the age-verification process in states that have passed the requirement. 

 “What they do, according to our data, is hit the back button and find a site that doesn’t comply with the law,” she said.

Porn ID laws in other states

Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Kentucky have adopted age-verification requirements for porn sites based on “model legislation” from the Center for Renewing America, a conservative activist group, according to the California bill’s legislative analysis. The organization’s website lists its motto as “For God. For Country. For Community.”

The bill’s legislative analysis noted that the online porn site Pornhub blocked users in those states after the age-verification requirements became law. 

Last month, Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a similar bill.

Late last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Free Speech Coalition’s challenge to the Texas law, which had been upheld by a federal appellate court.  

The laws are new, and some were immediately blocked from taking effect due to legal challenges, so there’s little public data about how effective they’ve been in preventing kids from accessing porn or the impact on web traffic to porn sites.

The European Union in December passed its own age-verification law. Bauer-Kahan told the Assembly that California should follow those European countries’ lead. 

“Europe, which has much stronger privacy laws than our country, has done this,” she said. “They have found a way to put the verification of your age on your phone. A token is sent to the website without your personally identifiable information, and then you, if you’re an adult, can access legal pornography.”

Alanis told the Assembly last week that his bill isn’t that different from how retailers have traditionally prevented children from accessing other types of adults-only products. His bill, he said, would include porn sites in the same California law that prevents children from purchasing products including tobacco, fireworks, spray paint and firearms.

“I believe that California requires its own tailored approach,” he said. “That’s why my team and I have worked … to craft a workable bill using an existing statute that California has long used to protect our children from other types of harm.”

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