US appeals court rejects TikTok request to temporarily halt pending US ban

WASHINGTON – TikTok must now move quickly with a request to the Supreme Court to block or overturn a law that will require its Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest of the short-video app by Jan 19, after an appeals court on Dec 13 rejected a bid for more time.

TikTok and ByteDance on Dec 9 had filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to make its case to the US Supreme Court.

The companies had warned that without court action, the law would “shut down TikTok – one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms – for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users”.

But the court rejected the bid.

The unanimous court order on Dec 13 said TikTok and ByteDance had not identified a previous case “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”.

A TikTok spokesperson said after the ruling that the company planned to take its case to the Supreme Court, “which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech”.

Under the law,

TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance divests it by Jan 19

. The law also gives the US government sweeping powers to ban other foreign-owned apps that could raise concerns about collection of Americans’ data.

The US Justice Department argues that “continued Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security”.

TikTok says the Justice Department has misstated the social media app’s ties to China, arguing that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the US on cloud servers operated by Oracle, while content moderation decisions that affect US users are made in the US.

The decision – unless the Supreme Court reverses it – puts TikTok’s fate first in the hands of President Joe Biden on whether to grant a 90-day extension of the Jan 19 deadline to force a sale, and then of President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Jan 20.

Trump, who unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, said before the November presidential election that he would not allow the ban on TikTok.

Also on Dec 13, the chairperson of a US House of Representatives committee on China and the group’s top Democrat told the chief executive officers of Apple and Google parent Alphabet that they must be ready to remove TikTok from their US app stores on Jan 19. REUTERS