The court, which hears arguments on Friday in a challenge to a law banning the app, has issued varying rulings when those two interests clashed.

The Chinese-owned app is battling for survival as a deadline looms over its fate.

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block criminal sentencing in his hush-money case in New York set for Friday in Manhattan.

Prosecutors have been ordered to respond to the president-elect’s request by Thursday morning, suggesting the court could rule before Friday’s scheduled sentencing.

President-elect Trump's highly unusual intervention in the Supreme Court's TikTok case reads almost like a guy asking for a favor from an institution that still runs on formality. The big picture: Trump's last-minute effort to give TikTok a stay of execution is one more twist in a case that already scrambles every ideological dividing line.

President-elect Donald Trump has urged the Supreme Court to halt the Jan. 19 TikTok ban if parent company ByteDance fails to sell the platform.

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments Friday in a case over the future of social media giant TikTok in the United States, a challenge that experts say also could affect the power of Congress to regulate social media.