After an appeals court on Friday denied a request for additional time, TikTok must now act swiftly by asking the US Supreme Court to prevent or invalidate a statute that would oblige its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell out the short-video app by January 19.
In an emergency motion filed Monday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, TikTok and ByteDance requested additional time to present their case before the US Supreme Court.
The businesses had threatened to “shut down TikTok, one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users,” if the law wasn’t challenged in court.
But in a unanimous ruling on Friday, the court dismissed the bid, stating that TikTok and ByteDance had failed to cite a prior instance “in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court.”
The business intends to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, “which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech,” according to a TikTok representative.
TikTok will be prohibited by law unless ByteDance sells it by January 19.
The measure also grants the US government broad authority to prohibit other foreign-owned apps that can raise questions about how Americans’ data is being collected.
“Continuous Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security,” according to the US Justice Department.
By claiming that its content recommendation engine and user data are housed in the US on cloud servers run by Oracle and that content moderation decisions that impact US users are made in the US, TikTok claims the Justice Department has misrepresented the social media app’s connections to China.
The ruling, barring a Supreme Court overturn, places TikTok’s future in the hands of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who assumes office on January 20, and Democratic President Joe Biden, who must decide whether to grant a 90-day extension of the deadline for forcing a sale on January 19.
Prior to the November presidential election, Trump, who made a failed attempt to outlaw TikTok during his first term in 2020, declared that he would not permit the ban.
Additionally, the senior Democrat and chair of a US House of Representatives committee on China reminded Apple and Alphabet CEOs that they need to prepare to withdraw TikTok from their US app stores on January 19.
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