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A Supreme Court majority is expected to uphold a controversial ban on TikTok over concerns about its ties to China, with the justices asking pointed questions of the social media app’s lawyers and a group of its content creators.

During the more than two-hour oral argument, many of the justices appeared to view the sell-or-ban law passed by Congress in April not as one that primarily implicates the First Amendment, but rather as an attempt to curb the potential foreign Controlling a country to regulate app used by 170 million Americans.

The law, which would restrict the app’s operation in the US unless China-based parent company ByteDance divests from the platform, is set to take effect on January 19 unless the Supreme Court intervenes and temporarily blocks the app. A decision on this issue — the date the ban will be implemented — could come quickly, long before justices resolve any underlying questions about speech protections.

Two presidents – Donald Trump and Joe Biden – have both raised concerns in the past about the manipulation of content on the platform and its data collection practices. TikTok argued those concerns were speculative and rejected any claim that the Chinese government played a role in selecting the cat videos, recipes and news that millions of Americans watch on the app.

Here are the key takeaways from Friday’s hearing:

Justices across the ideological spectrum expressed doubt that the TikTok ban even implicates the First Amendment. That’s a bad sign for TikTok because in order to win, the company had to first prove that the First Amendment applied in the case, and then that the law failed to meet its requirements.

In an exchange with an attorney for users of the application, Chief Justice John Roberts said that Congress “agreed with the language” in passing the law.

“They’re not comfortable with a foreign adversary collecting, as they’ve discovered, all this information about the 170 million people who use TikTok,” he said.

Roberts also pressed TikTok’s attorney on the lack of precedent for the court striking down a law aimed at regulating a company’s corporate structure on First Amendment grounds.

Justice Elena Kagan also had questions that suggested she wasn’t sure whether the First Amendment even applied in the case, although she also asked skeptical questions of the government later in the argument.

“The law only targets this foreign company that has no First Amendment rights,” she told the attorney representing TikTok.

Traditionally, the Supreme Court has favored the other branches of government when it comes to national security. This is precisely why Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar focused so much of her arguments on this issue.

“For years, the Chinese government has tried to create detailed profiles of Americans – where we live and work, who our friends and colleagues are, what our interests are and what our vices are,” Prelogar makes her final argument on behalf of the US before Biden government, told the Supreme Court.

TikTok’s “vast data set,” she said, would give China “a powerful tool for harassment, recruitment and espionage.”

That argument seemed to persuade both Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative who is often at the ideological center of the court.

Kavanaugh said Congress and the president were “concerned that China could access information on millions of Americans – tens of millions of Americans – including teenagers and people in their 20s” and that the country could use that information “to blackmail people . “People – people who will be working at the FBI, the CIA, or the State Department in a generation.”

As the arguments progressed, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed most concerned about the ban.

“Don’t we normally assume that counter-speech is the best way to combat problematic speech?” Gorsuch asked, echoing a suggestion from TikTok that Congress should have considered warning labels for the platform rather than an outright ban.

“TikTok,” Gorsuch pointed out, “says it could even live with a disclaimer on its website saying it can be secretly manipulated by China.”

In a court that has reliably expanded First Amendment rights for several decades, Gorsuch expressed reservations about the government’s theory that those protections don’t even apply in this case. To underscore these concerns, he hypothesized a foreign-owned newspaper. According to their theory, could the government try to shut down this hypothetical platform, he asked.

One of the important differences between a newspaper and a social media platform, Prelogar replied, is that social media users expect “they will be fed videos organically based on the recommendation engine.” She said that newspapers tend to be one-way forms of communication.

Kagan, peppering both sides of the case with tough questions, raised similar themes. She pointed to the country’s history of allowing foreign embassies into the United States, including communist propaganda during the height of the Cold War that may have had ties to the Soviet Union.

“You know, in the middle of the 20th century we were very concerned about the Soviet Union and what the Soviet Union was doing in this country,” Kagan said.

If Congress had told the Communist Party in the United States that it had to break off relations with the Soviet Union, “do you think that would have been absolutely OK?”

Unless Supreme Court orders block the law, TikTok will be “hidden” from January 19, said its lawyer Noel Francisco.

“As far as I know, we closed on January 19th,” he said.

Francisco, a former attorney general during the Trump administration, said he expects TikTok to be removed from app stores “at a minimum.”

“But more than that, the law says that all other types of service providers cannot provide services either,” he added. “Now a violation of this has enormous consequences for the service providers.”

If TikTok is removed by app store operators, that means new users won’t be able to download it. For existing users who already have the app on their phones, it won’t go away, but since they won’t be able to update it through the app stores, it will likely become buggy and full of security holes at some point.

But even if the court upholds the ban, significant uncertainty remains in the Trump administration about the app’s accessibility. Trump has said he wants to save TikTok and the law gives him wide latitude in enforcing it.

“It is possible that we will be in a different world on January 20th, 21st and 22nd,” Francisco said.

Prelogar declined to say whether Trump might extend the deadline after it has already expired.

“If push comes to shove and these restrictions go into effect,” Prelogar said, “this could be exactly the jolt that Congress expected that the company would actually have to move forward with the divestiture process.”

The justices couldn’t escape the fact that Trump, even though he had not yet been sworn in, took the high-profile step of filing a brief asking the court to temporarily suspend implementation of the ban on January 19 to allow him time as president give to negotiate a deal Get involved with TikTok.

Alito, a conservative who has often clashed with Prelgoar, asked the attorney general whether the court had the authority to impose a so-called administrative stay on the law – a move that would effectively grant what Trump sought.

Prelogar said the court certainly had the authority if it needed more time to decide the case, but she noted that it had been fully briefed and was now arguing.

The earlier exchange about Trump’s ability to not enforce the ban prompted Kavanaugh to question whether TikTok could rely on a non-enforcement assurance from the president-elect when deciding its next steps.

As the attorney general’s presentation ended, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor returned to the idea with a warning.

“I’m a little concerned that when a law is in place prohibiting certain actions, suggesting that the president-elect or someone else would not enforce the law would lead a company to ignore enforcement of another assurance “A change to this law,” she said, while emphasizing that the company would be violating the law in this scenario.

“Whatever the new president does doesn’t change this reality for these companies,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional details.