With every passing day, the US government inches closer to doing something unprecedented: banning a social media app used by an estimated 170 million Americans each month.
But what would happen next? Well, TikTok almost certainly wouldn’t suddenly vanish off your smartphone, and no police officer would barge down your door to stop your scrolling.
Beyond that, things get murky – and the impact might be bigger than it seems at first.
On Wednesday December 18, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge to the bipartisan 2024 law that would force its Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the platform to a U.S. company by January 10 or see it banned entirely.
Backers of the law argue that ByteDance’s ownership gives the Chinese government a potential backdoor into the private information of its U.S. users, as well as a powerful covert propaganda tool.
TikTok and its supporters argue that the company has already made efforts to wall its U.S. users’ data off from ByteDance, and that banning it now would infringe on free speech and impact the livelihoods of millions of people.
So what should we expect if and when the U.S. government finally pulls the trigger?
Let’s assume the Supreme Court doesn’t stop the ban. Let’s assume Trump doesn’t stop it either (although he’s trying, last week he asked SCOTUS to block the ban).
First things first: the law that Congress passed doesn’t make it a crime for you to use TikTok, or to have the app on your phone.
Instead, it forces intermediary companies such as Apple and Google – which control the iOS and Android app stores respectively – to stop providing access to TikTok.
“It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update – or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of – a foreign adversary controlled application,” the law states.
Entities that violate this law can be fined by $5,000 per user who was illegally permitted to access or update the app. With TikTok’s 170 million users, that would be a maximum of $8.5 billion.
Once this happened, the TikTok app would probably stay on your phone if you already have it installed. Apple and Google have limited power to simply yank content away from you.
But nobody would be able to download the app anew – at least, not officially. (More on that later.)
