The future of TikTok in the United States has been debated for years, and on Friday, it will get its day before the Supreme Court. The high court will hear oral arguments from two cases involving the TikTok ban-or-sell bill that passed Congress last spring: One from TikTok and its owner ByteDance, and one from TikTok content creators.

What nobody knows at this point is how the court might rule on the issues presented, but it will likely be a speedy ruling. The law is scheduled to take effect on January 19, and the Supreme Court decided not to pause it, meaning the court could rule within days. The law requires China-owned ByteDance to either sell the popular video sharing app to an entity in a U.S.-friendly country, or for U.S. companies to stop hosting it on their platforms.

The app has been controversial. TikTok says it has more than 170 million U.S. users, and more than 7 million businesses in the U.S. used the platform in 2023, driving $15 billion in small business revenue. But ByteDance has also used the app to spy on Americans, including Forbes journalists who reported on it. It’s been banned from devices owned by the federal government and most states.

President-elect Donald Trump, who says his campaign’s TikTok posts earned billions of views, has asked the Supreme Court to postpone the ruling until he takes office—one day after the ban is set to take effect. In a brief filed as part of the case, his lawyers wrote, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.” The court has yet to respond to this brief, and there seems to be little that Trump can do if the court rules in favor of the law.

In the meantime, marketers and influencers have likely been testing the waters on other social apps, trying to find the next popular platform to catch a wide audience. Some users are trying out Lemon8, an app with similar features, but that’s also owned by ByteDance. However, according to Meltwater’s annual State of Social Media report, more than 40% of companies are looking at an older and still-relevant video app as a place to invest more time: YouTube.

Generative AI has been changing everything about work, but many advocates say these shifts are for the better. I talked to Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design & emerging products, about how AI and new technologies will be impacting creators and Adobe’s suite of tools this year. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019.

On social media, 2025 may be shaping up to be the year that people really start questioning if they can believe what they see. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company is dropping their independent fact-checking program for posts on its platform. Instead, it will use a self-policing system like X’s community notes, in which users can flag posts with incorrect or misleading information that will appear alongside the post. In a video posted on Facebook, Zuckerberg said the move is helping the company get back to its roots, saying the fact-checkers........

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