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US Supreme Court rejects TikTok appeal

The US Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by social-media platform TikTok against a law that would ban it in the US from Sunday (19 January). 

The law requires TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, to be removed from Chinese control in order to avoid the measure.  

Today (17 January), the judges rejected arguments that the law would violate the US constitution’s First Amendment on free speech. 

The court said that it imposed “TikTok-specific prohibitions, due to a foreign adversary’s control over the platform”, adding that the provisions of the law did not target particular speech based upon its content. 

Concerns ‘well-supported’ 

“TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign-adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the government’s national-security concerns,” the judgment stated. 

It found that the provisions of the law “further an important government interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and do not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further that interest”.  

The court concluded that the US government’s concerns about the potential collection of data by China were “well-supported”. 

The White House’s press secretary said that actions to implement the law would fall to President-elect Donald Trump's administration when it took office on Monday.