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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The new class is the first admitted after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 barred colleges and universities from considering race in admissions resulting from a pair of cases filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

The new Harvard Law data is not broken down by race, meaning it does not reflect possible shifts between different minority groups such as Asian, Black and Hispanic students.

The Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, prompted concern within the legal industry that longstanding efforts to bolster attorney diversity would falter.

Plaintiffs in the cases argued that considering race in admissions was discriminatory against white and Asian American applicants.

This year’s 8-perentage-point decline in students of color at Harvard Law equates to about 45 fewer non-white first-year students out of a class of 560 at the elite law school. At 43%, the proportion of students of color is Harvard’s lowest since 2017. That figure reached a high of 56% in 2021, school data shows.

A Harvard Law spokesperson did not immediately provide comment on the decline Thursday.

Harvard University last week reported that the percentage of Black students in its freshman class dropped by more than a fifth. That class is 14% Black, compared with 18% last year, Harvard said, while the share of Hispanic students ticked up slightly from 14% to 16%.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming freshman class this year dropped to 16% Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students compared with 31% in previous years, which officials attributed to the affirmative action ban.

Half of the law schools ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News & World Report have disclosed some diversity figures, with five saying that their proportion of students of color either held steady or increased over last year.

Along with Harvard Law, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law is the only other top-14 law school to thus far report a year-over-year decline—falling to 50% students of color from 57% last year. A Berkeley Law spokesperson said the California school, which has been under a state-imposed affirmative action ban since 1996, did not change its admissions process and that the makeup of its class fluctuates every year.

The American Bar Association will release detailed, school-specific enrollment data broken down by race in December.

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Prosecutors and defense lawyers are bitterly at odds over the next steps in the case after the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the prosecution by ruling that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity from criminal charges. The dueling proposals and testy courtroom exchanges reflected the extent to which the justices’ July opinion had upended the path of the case that charges Trump with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

“We may be dealing with an illegitimate indictment from the get-go,” Trump attorney John Lauro said. He added: “We want an orderly process that does justice to the Supreme Court opinion.”

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team filed a revised indictment last week to strip out certain allegations against Trump for which the Supreme Court said Trump, the Republican nominee for president, enjoyed immunity. Defense lawyers, however, believe that that indictment did not fully comply with the justices’ ruling.

Lauro told U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the Supreme Court’s opinion required the outright dismissal of the case, a position the judge made clear she did not accept. He complained that prosecutors were showing a “rush to judgment” with their plans to soon file court papers explaining why the remaining allegations should remain intact.

Chutkan was unmoved on that point as well.

“This case has been pending for over a year,” Chutkan said, referencing the fact that the matter has been frozen since last December while Trump pursued his immunity appeal. “We’re hardly sprinting to the finish here.” She said it was clear that whatever her ruling, it would be subject to a further appeal.

She also bristled at Lauro’s reference to the November election, such as when he said: “This process is inherently unfair, particularly during this sensitive time.”

“I understand that there is an election,” the judge replied. “I’ve said before … that the electoral process and the timing of the election … is not relevant here. The court is not concerned with the electoral schedule.”

Lauro told Chutkan that the case concerned momentous issues. “We are talking about the presidency of the United States,” he said. Chutkan shot back: “I’m not talking about the presidency of the United States. I’m talking about a four count indictment.”

She told Lauro that it appeared the defense was trying to delay the case because of the election. “That’s not going to be a factor I consider at all,” Chutkan said.

Pushing back on the defense’s claims that the special counsel wants to move too quickly, a member of Smith’s prosecution team noted that Trump’s lawyers filed a lengthy brief seeking to overturn his New York hush money conviction and dismiss the case less than two weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling in July.

“The defense can move comprehensively, quickly and well. So can we,” Thomas Windom said.

The tense exchanges between Lauro and Chutkan defined the early hearings in the case. But there was a lighter start of Thursday’s session.

At the opening, Chutkan noted that it has been almost a year since she saw the lawyers in her courtroom. Lauro joked to the judge that “life was almost meaningless without seeing you.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Chutkan said.

The hearing ended without the judge issuing an order about future dates in the case.

Trump was not in the courtoom and gave an economic speech in New York. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf for the revised indictment.

Defense lawyers said they intend to file multiple motions to dismiss the case, including one that piggybacks off a Florida judge’s ruling that said Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

Neither side envisions a trial happening before Election Day, especially given the amount of work ahead. Chutkan is tasked with determining which of the acts alleged in the indictment can remain part of the case in light of the Supreme Court opinion.

The justices in July ruled that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for the exercise of their core constitutional duties and are presumptively immune from prosecution for all other official acts.

Smith’s team responded to the ruling with a revised indictment last week that removed references to Trump’s efforts to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to remain in power, an area of conduct for which the Supreme Court said Trump is immune.

The case is one of two federal prosecutions against Trump. The other, charging him with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, was dismissed in July by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. She said Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.

Smith’s team has appealed that ruling. Trump’s lawyers say they intend to ask Chutkan to dismiss the election case on the same grounds.

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The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration overstepped when it changed course from predecessors and banned bump stocks, which allow a rate of fire comparable to machine guns. The decision came after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival with semiautomatic rifles equipped with the accessories.

The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd in 11 minutes, sending thousands of people fleeing in terror as hundreds were wounded and dozens killed.

The ruling thrust guns back into the center of the political conversation with an unusual twist as Democrats decried the reversal of a GOP administration’s action and many Republicans backed the ruling.

The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas found the Justice Department was wrong to declare that bump stocks transformed semiautomatic rifles into illegal machine guns because, he wrote, each trigger depression in rapid succession still only releases one shot.

The ruling reinforced the limits of executive reach and two justices — conservative Samuel Alito and liberal Sonia Sotomayor — separately highlighted how action in Congress could potentially provide a more lasting policy, if there was political will to act in a bipartisan fashion.

Originally, imposing a ban through regulation rather than legislation during Donald Trump’s presidency took pressure off Republicans to act following the massacre and another mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Prospects for passing gun restrictions in the current divided Congress are dim.

President Joe Biden, who supports gun restrictions, called on Congress to reinstate the ban imposed under his political foe. Trump’s campaign team meanwhile, expressed respect for the ruling before quickly pivoting to his endorsement by the National Rifle Association.

As Trump courts gun owners while running to retake the presidency, he has appeared to play down his own administration’s actions on bump stocks, telling NRA members in February that “nothing happened” on guns during his presidency despite “great pressure.” He told the group that if he is elected again, “No one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was carried out by a high-stakes gambler who killed himself, leaving his exact motive a mystery. A total of 60 people were killed in the shooting, including Christiana Duarte, whose family called Friday’s ruling tragic.

“The ruling is really just another way of inviting people to have another mass shooting,” said Danette Meyers, a family friend and spokesperson. “It’s unfortunate that they have to relive this again. They’re really unhappy.”

The opinion comes after the same Supreme Court conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022. The high court is also expected to rule in another gun case in the coming weeks, challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.

The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were less about Second Amendment rights and more about whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a Justice Department agency, had overstepped its authority.

Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. Invented in the 2000s, they harness the gun’s recoil energy so that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the gun to fire at a similar speed as an automatic weapon.

The Supreme Court majority found that the 1934 law against machine guns defined them as weapons that could automatically fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger. Bump stocks don’t fit that definition because “the trigger must still be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot,” Thomas wrote. He also pointed to over a decade of ATF’s findings that claimed bump stocks weren’t automatic weapons.

The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, applauded the ruling in a video posted online, predicting the case would have ripple effects by hampering other ATF gun restrictions. “I’m glad I stood up and fought,” he said.

In a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Sotomayor said that bump stocks fit under the ordinary meaning of the law: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote. The ruling, she said, could hamstring the ATF and have “deadly consequences.”

ATF Director Steve Dettelbach echoed the sentiment, saying that bump stocks “pose an unacceptable level of risk to public safety.”

The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging. That was after the Las Vegas massacre and the Parkland, Florida shooting that left 17 dead.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks that aren’t expected to be affected by the ruling, though four state bans may no longer cover bump stocks in the wake of the ruling, according to the gun-control group Everytown.

Cargill was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the gun firing.

The Biden administration had argued that effort was minimal, and said the ATF came to the right conclusion on bump stocks after doing a more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting.

There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy them at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court documents.

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