TikTok one step closer to countering the ban in the US. A federal appeals court on Friday ruled to uphold a law that would force the popular social media giant to sell its assets to the US company or be shut out of the country altogether. The decision is the latest twist in a years-long battle between TikTok, which owns Chinese-based ByteDance, and the US government.
“TikTok’s thousands of users will need to find a means of communication,” said the judge, Douglas Ginsburg. “This burden must be given” [China’s] hybrid trade deals with US national security, not with the US government, that with TikTok through a multi-year process in an attempt to find another solution”.
TikTok said that piracy is not possible technologically, commercially or legally. The case is likely to move to the US Supreme Court.
TikTok first He led this case against the justice department in May. The three-judge panel said the law’s provisions “survive constitutional scrutiny.”
Ginsburg wrote that the measure was “the culmination of significant and bipartisan action by Congress and by successive presidents.” It was a concern of art to deal only with power from a foreign adversary and was a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat from the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”
TikTok has faced an onslaught of lawsuits, congressional hearings and investigations at both the federal and state level for several years. It reached its peak in April, when Joe Biden signed the bill into law ByteDance is required to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner or it will be banned by January. In 2023, Montana became the first state to ban TikTok, but a state judge blocked the law before it could take effect.
The US government says TikTok is a national security threat because China can use the app to access personal information from millions of Americans. Lawmakers also say they fear China could see millions of people on the app and the spread of the propaganda. The Beijing government or Bytedance have not disclosed this evidence.
“The fact that the Chinese Communists have made it clear that they are leveraging technology to collect data on our children and all US citizens,” said Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, in it is said in which the bill was introduced last March. “It’s time to fight back against the information invasion against TikTok in America’s families.”
In May, ByteDance, TikTok and other social media groups filed to block the law. They argue that it is overwhelmingly unfair to the social media company and violates the free speech rights of millions of users.
TikTok has 170 million US users on its platform, roughly half of the country’s population. Although its parent company is based in China, TikTok is controversial Until it is an authority because it operates separately and maintains headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles. It says its US user data is handled by Oracle, an American company.
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A number of civil and digital rights organizations opposed the ban, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Arts Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology. In a a letter to Congress Last March, they wrote that the privacy law would do more to protect people’s data. They said the proposal to ban TikTok is “censorship – plain and simple”.
By oral accounts for the case in September, a three-judge panel heard arguments from both sides of the appeals judges. One of the judges, Sri Srinivasan, said he was concerned when TikTok was owned by a foreign entity because it had the ability to access comments about US citizens’ data.
“When it’s a foreign organization, they don’t have a First Amendment right to object to the establishment of their treatment,” he said. He later denied that ByteDance taking off from TikTok could solve this problem.