Supreme Court upholds US ban on TikTok starting Sunday

The Supreme Court won't save TikTok. The highest judicial body rejected this Friday the appeal filed by the social network to prevent its ban on American soil, a law passed in April in Congress. As of this Sunday, January 19, TikTok will be officially banned in the United States, a country where it has 170 million users.

The authorities had imposed this deadline for the social network to cut its ties with its parent company, the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, and sell its American activities to an American group. A campaign motivated by national security issues: the application is accused of being subject to Chinese laws which require technology companies to contribute to the collection of intelligence, and would therefore theoretically allow Chinese authorities to have access to data from American users.

It is now up to the US government to force mobile application stores to remove the social network from their platform. TikTok will then no longer be downloadable. Users who already have the app will be able to keep it but will no longer be able to make updates, which will ultimately make it impossible to use.

But the American story of TikTok is not over yet. The ban will take effect the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump, who intends to save the video application. According to the American press, he could sign a decree as quickly as possible to postpone the deadline for the sale of TikTok by several months. Since last spring, the Republican has changed his tune after having himself sought to have the social network banned in 2020. Trump has nearly 15 million subscribers on TikTok since his registration last June.