Washington – A federal appeals court on Friday denied TikTok’s bid to delay the entry into force of a law that will ban the popular short-form video app next month if its Chinese parent company does not sell your participation.
“Petitioners rely on their First Amendment claims to justify the Act’s preliminary injunction. With respect to those claims, this court has already unanimously concluded that the Act meets the requirements of the First Amendment under scrutiny more intense,” the order. he said.
TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to intervene, although it is unclear whether the court will agree to hear the case or make a decision before the law takes effect on January 19.
The law, which was passed by Congress in April as part of a foreign aid package, gave TikTok nine months to cut ties with its parent company ByteDance or quickly lose access to stores applications and web hosting services to US President Biden. signed the bill into lawwhich includes the possibility of a one-time delay of 90 days granted by the President if a sale is in progress at the time.
But the Chinese government has vowed to block a potential sale of TikTok’s algorithm that tailors content recommendations to each user. A new buyer would be forced to rebuild the algorithm that powers the app, which is unfeasible, according to lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance.
TikTok suffered another setback on December 6 when a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit he refused his bid to overturn the lawconcluding that the US government’s national security concerns about the Chinese government’s ability to use the app to covertly spy on and influence Americans were “compelling” and “well-founded.”
TikTok and ByteDance then asked the appeals court to temporarily block the law from taking effect pending a Supreme Court review. A pause would also give the Trump administration time to act, the companies said in their filing December 9 of the court file. President-elect Donald Trump led an effort to ban TikTok during his first term, but has since said he would “save” the app.
Allowing the law to take effect, even for a short time, would be harmful to the platform, the filing argues. TikTok estimated it could lose a third of its daily users in the US within the first month of a shutdown. About 170 million people in the United States use TikTok.
But the Department of Justice rejected the claim that TikTok would face “immediate harm” if the law was not stopped. In his response, he noted that Americans who have already downloaded the app can continue to use it after January 19, although they won’t be able to update it.