On Friday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether to shut down one of the most popular online platforms in America. It’s difficult to contemplate or calculate the level of anguish and suffering the court’s decision may cause 170 million TikTok users. Indeed, one can foresee a national calamity of sorts, and to Gen Z followers and the folks who make lots of money off the app, close to the end of the world.

The court will review last month’s 92-page decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit which unanimously upheld the Act of Congress passed last April barring TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, from operating in the U.S. unless its owner sells the app to an American company by Jan. 19. The legislation had huge bipartisan support. Congress, then-President Donald Trump, and President Joe Biden declared TikTok a threat to national security, since the Chinese government could use the platform to gather data on Americans and influence government policy. Trump, declaring the continued operation of TikTok a national emergency, issued in 2020 an executive order designed to crack down on TikTok’s operations in the United States. His order stated that TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”