A federal appeals court on Friday rejected TikTok’s emergency request to temporarily block a law requiring its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest the short-video app by January 19 or face a ban.
TikTok and ByteDance had filed the motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia earlier in the week, seeking more time to present their case to the Supreme Court. The ruling now forces TikTok to quickly appeal to the Supreme Court to prevent the pending ban.
The companies warned that if no court intervention occurs, the law would effectively “shut down TikTok — one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms — for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users.”
In its ruling, the D.C. Circuit stated, “The petitioners have not identified any 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.”
TikTok has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Under the new law, TikTok will face a U.S. ban unless ByteDance divests its ownership. The law also grants the U.S. government extensive authority to ban other foreign-owned apps it deems a potential risk to Americans’ data security.
The Justice Department defends the legislation, stating that “continued Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security.” However, TikTok disputes these claims, asserting that its recommendation engine and user data are stored in the U.S. on Oracle-managed cloud servers and that content moderation decisions for American users are made domestically.
