US Supreme Court upholds law banning TikTok

TikTok, a platform that is used by almost half of all Americans, suffered a serious setback on Sunday when the US Supreme Court declined to save it from a law that would have forced the well-known short-video app to be either banned in the US on national security grounds or sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

The bill, which was signed by Democratic President Joe Biden and enacted by a resounding bipartisan majority in Congress last year, does not violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits the government from restricting free expression, the justices unanimously decided on Friday. After the law was contested by TikTok, ByteDance, and a few app users, the judges upheld a lower court’s ruling that had supported it.