Following a federal appeals court decision on Friday, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has until January 19 to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a ban in the US. Three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld an act signed into law by President Biden on April 24, 2024, which seeks to protect US citizens from “foreign adversary controlled applications.”
The court consolidated three petitions filed by ByteDance, Based Politics, Inc., and a group of creators who use TikTok that presented constitutional challenges to the new law. The court has denied them, explaining that “portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny.”
As a result of this decision, ByteDance’s last real hope of skirting the ban without divesting is to take the case to the Supreme Court. That said, it’s unlikely the highest court in the land will find the law any more unconstitutional than the appeals court did.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the judges concluded. “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.”
President-elect Donald Trump has claimed that he opposes the TikTok ban, despite trying to ban the app himself during his first term in 2020 via executive order. But the enemy of Trump’s enemy is his friend. “Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump told CNBC earlier this year. It’s unlikely Trump will be able to do much to stop the ban now that the wheels are in motion.