TikTok needs to ask the Supreme Court to block or overturn a law that would require its Chinese parent company ByteDance to abandon its short video app by 19 January after an appeals court rejected a bid for more time, according to Reuters.
ByteDance and TikTok filed an emergency motion on Monday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking for more time for the US Supreme Court to consider the case.
However, the court rejected the proposal, stating that 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.”
After the ruling, a TikTok spokesperson said the company plans to take the 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 gets rid of it by 19 January. The law also gives the US government broad authority to ban other foreign-owned apps that may raise concerns about Americans’ data collection.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice claims that “continued Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security.” However, TikTok claims that the Justice Department misrepresented the social media app’s connection to China by claiming that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the US on cloud servers managed by Oracle.
If the Supreme Court overturns the decision, TikTok’s fate will be in the hands of President Joe Biden and then of Republican President-elect Donald Trump. The latter tried to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, but said before the presidential election in November that he would not allow TikTok to be outlawed.
