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Federal Court Upholds Law to Force TikTok’s Chinese Parent Company to Sell Platform or Face Ban
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless the app’s Chinese parent company sells the platform.
A panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously declined to review the petition for relief from TikTok.
“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny,” judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “We therefore deny the petitions.”
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Ginsburg said. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
U.S. officials, including leaders at the Justice Department, have said TikTok poses a national security threat of “immense depth and scale” due to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
The company had unsuccessfully argued that the ban infringes on its First Amendment rights and that the law requiring divestment from ByteDance is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally,” particularly by the January 19 deadline.
Both the U.S. government and TikTok had asked the appeals court to weigh in by Friday to allow time for any following steps or appeals to play out before the ban is slated to take effect next month.
The case is now likely to head to the Supreme Court, where justices could agree to hear the case and temporarily prevent the law from taking effect, or they could allow the appeals court’s ruling to stand.
Aside from the Supreme Court, TikTok also hopes President-elect Donald Trump may step in and come to its aid.
Trump, a one-time critic of the app who tried to ban it himself during his first term in office, has since flip-flopped on the issue.
While he issued an executive order in 2020 demanding ByteDance sell TikTok or face a ban, Trump spoke out earlier this year against Congress’s renewed efforts to ban the app. He argued a ban on TikTok would only help Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”
Republican megadonor and billionaire Jeff Yass is reportedly one of the major influences behind Trump’s change of heart. Yass has a $33 billion stake in the short-form video platform.
Trump could intervene in several ways; the law has an option to allow for a 90-day extension of the January 19 deadline if there is “significant progress” toward a sale. Trump could step in and try to help negotiate a deal for TikTok’s sale to an American company or several investors.
He could also instruct his attorney general not to enforce the law if he finds that TikTok has taken appropriate steps to distance itself from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. One of those steps is the app’s “Project Texas,” an effort to wall off Americans’ data from China.