The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 10 about the constitutionality of a federal law that would require TikTok — the wildly popular video-based social media platform — to either face a ban in the United States or have its Chinese parent company sell to non-Chinese owners. Without action by the high court, the ban would go into effect on January 19. 

During the arguments, lawyers for TikTok and supporters of the app said the law violates the First Amendment’s freedom of speech rights and creates an unfair and unnecessary restriction on the app and its users. Attorneys for the government argued, however, that the app’s presence in the United States under Chinese ownership is a serious national security concern. 

While many court watchers believe the justices might let the ban take effect, based on the questions and points they raised during the oral arguments, TikTok remains wildly popular in the United States. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center this summer, only 32 percent of American adults said they would support the ban, down from 50 percent in March 2023. 

About one-third of all U.S. adults use the app — including close to 60 percent of adults under 30 and 63 percent of American teenagers, according to Pew. The majority of teens say they use the app at least daily; teen girls are more likely than teen boys to say they use TikTok almost constantly. 

TikTok has also become a key part of most Americans’ news media diets, per Pew: roughly one in two adults on TikTok say they regularly get their news from the app — or about 17 percent of all adults nationwide. Of those, 45 percent are 18- to 29-year-olds and almost 40 percent are between the ages of 30 and 49. Sixty-two percent are women. 

Though women are more likely to get their news from TikTok than men, a study from the Pew-Knight Initiative found that half of TikTok’s news influencers are men, compared to 45 percent who are women. Similar percentages of TikTok news influencers identify as openly right-leaning and openly left-leaning. At the same time, TikTok news influencers are more likely to show support for LGBTQ+ rights or identify as LGBTQ+ compared to news influencers on other social media platforms. 

As of September 2022, close to 56 percent of all content creators on TikTok were women. 

At the heart of the case before the Supreme Court is the 2024 Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in July. It identified China, North Korea, Russia and Iran as “foreign adversaries” of the United States and barred the use of digital apps controlled by those countries because of the risk for data collection about U.S. citizens. 

The push to ban TikTok began during the first administration of President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order in August 2020 barring American companies from engaging in any transactions with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company. The executive order came a month after Trump threatened to ban the app in the United States and six months after the Pentagon banned it from all military phones. 

In February 2022, FBI Director Chris Wray raised national security concerns about TikTok; a year later, the White House required the app deleted from all government-issued devices for federal employees. 

Over the past year, Trump seems to have changed his opinion; the presence of content creators supporting him on TikTok is widely believed to have been critical to his victory in the 2024 race, especially when it came to winning over Gen Z men. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court last month, asking in an amicus brief to utilize his “consummate dealmaking expertise” to find a buyer for the app in lieu of a ban.