TikTok received a frosty reception in its fight to save the platform at the Supreme Court, which during oral arguments Friday expressed sympathy with the government’s national security concerns about the platform’s ties to China.

The divest-or-ban law, which passed Congress with wide bipartisan majorities and was signed by President Biden in April, requires TikTok to face a ban in the U.S. beginning Jan. 19 unless it divests from its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance. The Supreme Court could still step in before then.

Across roughly 2 1/2 hours of argument, the justices asked piercing questions about TikTok’s First Amendment defense, posing hypotheticals about Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post, Elon Musk’s social platform X and even Politico’s foreign-based owner.

“Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “They don’t care about the expression. That’s shown by the remedy. They’re not saying TikTok has to stop. They’re saying the Chinese have to stop controlling TikTok.”

“So, it’s not a direct burden on the expression at all,” he continued.

TikTok, which has more than 170 million U.S. users, has said divestment is practically impossible and the platform would “go dark” in just days.

“These are the kind of things our enemies do. It is not what we do in this country,” said Jeffrey Fisher, an attorney representing the creators challenging the ban.

At the center of the case is whether the government’s national........

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