Here is the result in plain text:
A unanimous Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that effectively bans the wildly popular app TikTok in the United States starting on Sunday. The ruling ended, at least for now, a legal battle involving national security, free speech and a cultural phenomenon that had millions of Americans deliriously swiping their phone screens at any given moment.
The ruling, which forces the app to go dark if it remains under Chinese control, could be a death blow to TikTok’s American operations. President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is to be inaugurated the following day, has vowed to “save” the app though his mechanisms for doing so remain unclear.
In ruling against TikTok, the court acknowledged the wide-ranging cultural impact of the app while siding with the government’s concerns that China’s role posed national security concerns.
“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the court’s opinion said. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
TikTok gained a foothold in American culture in 2020 as a pandemic curiosity and swiftly grew into an undeniable juggernaut. It serves up short-form videos that are a leading source of information and entertainment to tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones.
The government had offered two justifications for the law: that China’s control of TikTok allowed it to harvest troves of private data and to spread covert disinformation. The court accepted only the first rationale, saying that TikTok’s ownership structure gave rise to distinctive and troubling concerns.
“The data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the majority opinion said. “But TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the government’s national security concerns.”
The majority said it was appropriate to defer to congressional judgments in the realm of national security, quoting from a 2010 decision upholding a law barring even benign support for terrorist organizations.
Mr. Trump has other alternatives. He could instruct the Justice Department not to enforce the law for now. He could urge Congress, now controlled by Republicans, to enact new legislation. Or he could try to persuade the owner, ByteDance, to comply with the law — by selling TikTok.
But that last option may not be feasible, as TikTok has repeatedly argued that China would bar the export of ByteDance’s algorithm.
“Authoritarian regimes should not have unfettered access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data,” he [Attorney General Merrick B. Garland] said in a statement. “The court’s decision affirms that this act protects the national security of the United States in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.”
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