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A federal appeals court has rejected TikTok‘s request to postpone a law that will ban the widely used video app next month unless its Chinese parent company sells its stake, CBS News reported.
“The petitioners base their argument on First Amendment claims to justify temporarily blocking the Act. However, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has already unanimously determined that the Act meets the First Amendment’s requirements under strict scrutiny,” the order stated on Friday.
TikTok is likely to request the Supreme Court’s involvement, although it is uncertain whether the court will agree to hear the case or issue a ruling before the law takes effect on January 19.
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The law, passed by Congress in April as part of a foreign aid package, gives TikTok nine months to sever its ties with its parent company, ByteDance, or face removal from app stores and loss of web-hosting services in the US. US President Joe Biden swiftly signed the bill into law, which also includes the possibility of a one-time 90-day delay if a sale is underway by that time. The Chinese government has pledged to prevent the sale of TikTok’s algorithm, which customises content recommendations for each user.
According to TikTok and ByteDance’s legal team, any new buyer would have to recreate the algorithm from scratch, a process deemed impractical.
On December 6, TikTok faced another setback when the appeals court rejected its attempt to overturn the law, ruling that the US government’s national security concerns regarding the Chinese government’s potential use of the app for espionage and covertly influencing Americans were “convincing” and “well-supported”.
TikTok and ByteDance subsequently requested the appeals court to temporarily block the law from taking effect while awaiting a Supreme Court review.
The companies argued in their December 9 filing that a pause would also give the Trump administration time to intervene. US President-elect Donald Trump had led efforts to ban TikTok during his first term but later expressed his intention to “save” the app.
The filing contended that allowing the law to take effect, even briefly, would harm the platform. TikTok projected that it could lose a third of its US daily users within a month of a shutdown, noting that about 170 million people in the US use the app, according to CBS News report.
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The Justice Department rejected the claim that TikTok would suffer “immediate harm” if the law wasn’t paused. In its response, it pointed out that Americans who downloaded the app could continue using it after January 19, though no updates would be available.
On Friday, leaders of the House China Committee sent letters to Google and Apple, urging them to be prepared to remove TikTok from their app stores by January 19, CBS News reported.
US Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the committee, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the panel, also addressed a letter to TikTok, urging the company to sell the app.
“Congress has taken strong action to safeguard US national security and protect American TikTok users from the Chinese Communist Party. We strongly urge TikTok to proceed with a qualified divestiture,” they wrote.
