This morning, attorneys for TikTok appeared before the federal appeals court in Washington — challenging a law signed in April that forces the app to either cut ties with its China-based parent company (ByteDance) or be banned. What’s at stake? TikTok’s 170 million US users and 7 million businesses that rely on the app. TikTok believes the law is unconstitutional and is a First Amendment issue.

During the oral arguments, the US government argued that because TikTok’s recommendation engine is developed and maintained by ByteDance, “covert content manipulation” could occur. And because ByteDance is a foreign curator, it does not have a First Amendment claim.

However, as the appeals court judges poked into the government’s response, a number of questions were raised that pressure-test the scope of the First Amendment as it relates to TikTok:

  • Don’t TikTok’s US users have First Amendment interests?
  • What about the fact that TikTok is a US-based corporation?
  • Should no foreign entity be allowed to send speech into the US?

What hasn’t changed as a result of today’s appeals court arguments is the fact that all of this is based on the hypothetical of what China “might” do someday — that (as one judge put it) “the US government fears that TikTok’s content curation algorithm will affect US consumers in a way that would be problematic for US interests.”

So, what happens next?

No doubt this is a high-stakes, very complicated conundrum. The Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that the three-judge appeals court panel issue a ruling by December. This means the case is all but certain to escalate to the Supreme Court. But there’s something happening before that ruling: the US presidential election in November. You can bet its outcome will affect TikTok’s ultimate fate. It’s more than blatant hypocrisy if either candidate (having been active on TikTok themselves) bamboozled the young and vocal TikTok users that helped to elect them. According to Forrester’s Consumer Benchmark Survey, 2024, 47% of US Gen Z adults use TikTok at least weekly.

In the end, we don’t believe TikTok is going anywhere in 2025. It’s become an outsized part of our culture, creators depend on it, and banning the app would effectively hand a monopoly on short-form video over to Meta — something that’s completely contrary to the DOJ’s concerted crackdown on big tech.

Forrester clients: Let’s chat more about this via a Forrester guidance session.