TikTok is offline in the US after the Supreme Court upholds the banExBulletin

The TikTok logo is projected onto a cellphone with the American flag in the background for a photo illustration in Krakow, Poland, January 17. Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images .

switch captionBeata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

TikTok is no longer accessible to users in the United States, the result of a controversial law forcing the popular platform offline unless it splits from its China-based owner, ByteDance.

When millions of users tried to open the app on Saturday evening, a notification appeared: “Sorry, TikTok is not available at the moment,” it read. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the United States. Unfortunately, this means you cannot use TikTok at this time.”

The post went on to say that President-elect Donald Trump promised to “work with us on a solution to restore TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”

Around the same time, TikTok also stopped appearing on the Apple and Google Play app stores, preventing the app from downloading and removing it from critical software updates.

This is the first time in history that the US government has banned a popular social media network.

The pop-up message millions of users across the United States received when they tried to open TikTok on Saturday evening, hours before a ban law took effect. Bobby Allyn/NPR .

switch captionBobby Allyn/NPR

The TikTok ban could be short-lived, however. Trump said Saturday he would “most likely” grant a 90-day reprieve from enforcement once he takes office Monday.

Such an expansion is permitted by law, although it requires a legally binding certification to Congress that steps to divest from ByteDance are underway.

The law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, ordered Apple and Google to remove the service from app stores. It also forced web hosting companies, including TikTok's back-end cloud provider Oracle, to stop supporting the app or face penalties that could reach billions of dollars.

It remains to be seen how long the service will remain offline, but the development has drawn criticism from free speech advocates, who said it amounts to the type of government censorship that America often condemns on the world stage. .

Free speech advocacy group PEN America attacked the Supreme Court's decision. “Restricting access to foreign media is a hallmark of repressive governments, and we must always be cautious when national security is invoked to silence speech,” the advocacy group said in a statement Friday.

The prospect of TikTok shutting down in the United States has been mooted for more than four years, but it has often been blocked by the courts or disbanded amid political wrangling.

However, in April 2024, Congress passed a ban with overwhelming bipartisan support. Lawmakers fear that TikTok owner ByteDance is being manipulated by the Chinese government, exposing Americans' data and content streams to the whims of an antagonistic regime.

Earlier this month, TikTok argued before the Supreme Court that the law represented an unprecedented suppression of free speech. Yet the Supreme Court ruled in an unsigned unanimous decision that “divestment is necessary” to assuage lawmakers’ fears about China. Therefore, the court ruled, Congress acted legally when it voted to crack down on the wildly popular video app.

TikTok now faces an uncertain path forward.

President-elect Donald Trump issued a statement after the Supreme Court's ruling, saying the ruling should be respected and that his new administration would need more time to review the ruling. Trump has pledged to keep TikTok alive in the United States, but it remains unclear how he might deliver on that promise.

One possibility would be to revive a national security agreement known as Project Texas, which TikTok says it has spent more than $2 billion implementing. The plan aims to insulate any potential influence from Beijing by placing Austin-based Oracle as a sort of supervisor of data exchanged between ByteDance and TikTok. It also allows third-party audits of TikTok's content recommendation algorithm. If TikTok is determined to have failed to comply with the agreement, the agreement includes a “kill switch” in which federal officials could deactivate TikTok.

TikTok proposed the plan to the Biden administration, which, at the eleventh hour, withdrew from the deal without ever explaining why, according to court documents filed in TikTok's lawsuit against the administration over the law of disinvestment or prohibition.

Some longtime TikTok watchers say Trump could take over these negotiations and determine that this is a “qualified divestment,” that is, an arrangement by which TikTok is sufficiently distanced from ByteDance.

This decision can be made solely at the discretion of the President and his administration. He leaves Trump with the final say on the future of TikTok in the United States.

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