A law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell the app by January. 19 or face an outright US ban was upheld in a US appeals court on Friday – setting up a Supreme Court showdown in the coming weeks.
A three-judge panel in Washington rejected an argument by TikTok’s lawyers that the law, which received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and was signed by President Biden in April, was unconstitutional and a violation of free speech.
“The years-long efforts of both political branches to investigate the national security risks posed by the TikTok platform and to consider possible solutions proposed by TikTok weigh heavily in favor of the Act,” the court said in its ruling.
Congress pursued the sell-or-ban bill over concerns that TikTok is a national security risk that gave China a spying and propaganda tool on American soil. TikTok has strongly denied the allegations.
TikTok criticized the appeals court’s decision in a statement and immediately signaled its intention to take the case to the Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court has an established record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect them to do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and implemented based on inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in complete censorship of the American people,” the statement added. “Banning TikTok, if not stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19, 2025.”
The President has the option of extending the sale deadline by 90 days if he is satisfied that sufficient progress has been made towards a sale.
Right now, the law is scheduled to go into effect the day before President-elect Trump takes office.
Trump — a longtime critic of TikTok — has recently toned down his rhetoric against the app and said he opposes a ban. However, it is unclear whether he would be able to intervene on her behalf.
TikTok claims that selling the app is not possible within the limited time frame of the invoice.
The Chinese government has signaled that it opposes any forced sales of TikTok or its underlying technology.
“What we’ve finally done is find a way forward in terms of regulating technology in a responsible and thoughtful way,” said Joel Thayer, a D.C.-based technology policy advocate and outspoken critic of TikTok.
“We are stopping the Chinese government from using our legal mechanisms against us and from using our First Amendment against us,” Thayer added. “And it’s a reminder to all our foreign adversaries that the First Amendment is a shield for our rights, not theirs.”
As The Post reported, TikTok faced pointed questions from the three-panel judge at a hearing in October.
Legal experts said the judges seemed unconvinced by key elements of TikTok’s argument against the law.
Justice Department lawyers argued that TikTok poses an unacceptable risk to national security under ByteDance — though much of the evidence he cited to that point remains redacted.
During the October hearing, the feds warned that China could change TikTok’s algorithm for nefarious purposes.
“It’s farcical to suggest that with these two billion lines of code — 40 times the size of the entire Windows operating system, changed 1,000 times every day — that somehow we’re going to find out that they changed it,” the attorney for DOJ’s Daniel. Tenny said at the time.
In filings in July, the feds alleged that TikTok was able to collect sensitive data about issues such as gun control and abortion from its users and cited fears that Beijing could weaponize the app.
By postal wire
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