What happens to my TikTok if the ban is enforced?

new York
CNN
—

The fate of TikTok in the United States is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. And things aren’t looking good for the app.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday on the law this could ban TikTok in the United States. The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, requires TikTok to be sold to its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a U.S. ban.

The audience it didn’t seem to be going well for TikTok, making it more likely than ever that the ban will come into effect from January 19. Most of the justices appeared likely to uphold the law, asking tough questions of TikTok’s lawyers and its users about the relevance of their argument that the law violates the First Amendment.

Many questions remain about how the ban would work in practice, as there is no precedent of the U.S. government blocking a major social media platform. And how the government plans to implement it remains unclear.

Even TikTok’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, seemed uncertain about exactly how a ban would be enforced. “On January 19, as I understand it, we closed our doors,” he said.

Beyond unavailability in app stores, “what the law says is that all other types of service providers can’t provide services either,” Francisco said. “So essentially what they’re going to say is, I think, ‘we’re not going to provide the services necessary for you to see it.’ So it will basically stop working. I think this is the consequence of this law.

TikTok itself said in its emergency filing with the Supreme Court that if the court does not block the law, it “will take effect on January 19, 2025, shutting down TikTok for its more than 170 million users American Monthly”.

But some things are clear, including the fact that TikTok won’t suddenly disappear from existing users’ phones.

Here’s what we know about how a ban works.

Technically, TikTok could take its part and go home, by itself blocking access to the app for American users, in order to rebuke the American government and strengthen its negotiating position with the support of millions of people newly in anger, deprived of their beloved TikTok. But given the efforts to avoid a ban, it’s more likely that the U.S. government will have to act to enforce the law.

The US government is widely expected to force app store operators, like Google and Apple, to remove TikTok from their platforms.

This would mean that new users would not be able to download it. TikTok existing US users could are still using the app on their phones, but they won’t be able to update it through the app stores, meaning the company won’t be able to fix any bugs or security flaws. And any one of these things can add up, ultimately making the app difficult – or even impossible – to use.

“Potentially, vulnerabilities will be discovered in the app and hackers will take advantage of them to compromise your account or device,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNN. Podcast Terms of Use.

Still, it could take weeks or months before existing users see their experience on the app degrade.

The government could also force American Internet service providers (ISPs), which provide access to the Internet and the websites on it, to block TikTok, making it impossible to access the web version of the platform. But that approach would be complicated, Galperin said, because there are many more ISPs than app stores.

Regardless of the precise route the government takes to block TikTok, there will almost certainly be ways around it, such as: using a virtual private network, or VPN. A VPN is a program that anyone can download that can hide location data and make it appear as if the user is accessing the Internet from another country.

“Many other countries have blocked social media apps and websites in the past using a variety of different methods, with a very wide range of results and levels of effectiveness,” Galperin said. “In Türkiye, for example, many social media sites have been blocked for years, and almost everyone in Turkey has a VPN that circumvents this censorship.”

Even if the ban goes into effect, it is not necessarily permanent. ByteDance would still have the option to sell the platform to a non-Chinese owner to restore access to American users.

And there are willing buyers. A group created by billionaire Frank McCourt and backed by Shark Tank famed investor Kevin O’Leary said Thursday it makes an official offer to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets, even though the company has repeatedly said the app is not for sale.

“When things happen and these restrictions come into effect, I think it will fundamentally change the landscape in terms of what ByteDance is willing to consider,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court on Friday. who defended the government. “This may be just the shock that Congress expected the company would need to move forward with the divestiture process.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s promises to save TikTok also added uncertainty about how a ban would play out.

Ahead of Friday’s Supreme Court hearing, Trump filed a brief urging the court to temporarily halt implementation of the ban. – which is currently scheduled to begin a day before his inauguration – to give him time as president to negotiate a sale of TikTok.

Legal experts have also suggested that Trump could simply choose not to enforce the law and signal to Apple and Google that they will not be fined for continuing to host the app on their platforms.

“It is possible that next January 20, 21 and 22 we will be in a different world,” Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, said Friday, referring to the change in administration.

It’s not clear, however, that these companies would be willing to violate the letter of the law, even with Trump’s assurance.

“I am a little concerned by the suggestion that the president-elect or someone else would not enforce the law, when there is a law in place prohibiting certain actions, that a company would choose to ignore the law. “application of any assurance, other than a change in this law”, liberal–» said Judge Sonia Sotomayor during the hearing. “Whatever the new president does, it will not change the reality of these companies. »