With the Supreme Court approving the TikTok ban, the U.S. is embracing the type of internet authoritarianism it long opposed.

Millions of TikTok users in the United States are no longer able to watch videos on the social media platform as a federal ban on the immensely popular app takes effect.

TikTok was not available for many of its 170 million users in the U.S. hours before a ban on the popular social media platform was supposed to officially go into effect.

ByteDance has until January 19th to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner, or see the app banned in America. As the chances of a ban have grown, following the Supreme Court’s decision on January 17th to uphold a sell-or-ban law passed last year,

If the US ban goes ahead, experts point to the previous ousting of Chinese and Russian tech companies on national security grounds as a potential blueprint for how the TikTok ban

The company says it plans to go dark after the Supreme Court upheld a sell-or-ban law, but Trump says he will likely intervene.

RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, is owned by a Shanghai-based company and raises similar questions as TikTok.

TikTok is set to be banned in the US on 19 January after the Supreme Court denied a last ditch legal bid from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. It found the law banning the social media platform did not violate the first amendment rights of TikTok and its 170 million users,