Written by David Shepherdson and Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – TikTok must now move quickly with a request to the Supreme Court to block or overturn a law requiring Chinese parent ByteDance to pull the short-video app by January 19 after an appeals court on Friday rejected a request. Try for more time.
TikTok and ByteDance on Monday filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to take their case to the US Supreme Court.
The companies warned that without court action, the law would “result in the shutdown of TikTok — one of the country’s most popular expression platforms — with more than 170 million domestic users per month.”
But the court rejected the offer, saying TikTok and ByteDance had not identified a prior case “in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to a law passed by Congress, blocked a law from taking effect while seeking review in the Supreme Court.” The court issued a unanimous order on Friday.
A TikTok spokesperson said after the ruling that the company plans to take its case to the Supreme Court, “which has a well-established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free expression.”
Under the law, TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance withdraws it by January 19. The law also gives the US government broad powers to block other foreign-owned apps that could raise concerns about collecting Americans' data.
The US Department of Justice says that “China’s continued control over the TikTok application constitutes an ongoing threat to national security.”
TikTok says the Justice Department misinterpreted 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 (NYSE:) while content moderation decisions affecting US users are made in US. US.
The decision – unless overturned by the Supreme Court – puts TikTok's fate first in the hands of Democratic President Joe Biden on whether to grant a 90-day extension to the January 19 deadline to force the sale, and then in the hands of Republican President-elect Donald. Trump, who will take office on January 20.
Trump, who tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, said before the presidential election in November that he would not allow TikTok to be banned.
Also on Friday, the president and top Democrat on a US House panel on China told the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:) and Apple (NASDAQ:) that they should be prepared to remove TikTok from their US app stores in January. 19.
