Barbara McQuade, Columnist

TikTok Ban Will Be Trump’s First Big Test

Friday’s Supreme Court decision requires the president to enforce the law even if it’s unpopular or against his personal interests.

January 18, 2025 at 1:00 PM UTC

By Barbara McQuade

Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law school, a former US attorney and author of "Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America."

What will he do?
Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg

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President-elect Donald Trump will be tested early when he takes his oath of office on Monday.

On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law requiring the popular social media app TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, by Sunday or be banned. The court rejected the social media company’s argument that the law violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its content creators. According to ByteDance's lawyers, on Sunday, the app will “go dark.”