TikTok is one step closer to facing a ban in the US. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday in favor of upholding a law that forces the hugely popular social media company to sell its assets to a non-Chinese company or be completely excluded from the country. The decision is the latest twist in a years-long battle between the US government and TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance.
ByteDance has until January 19 to sell the app or face a ban.
“TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative means of communication,” Justice Douglas Ginsburg said. “That burden is attributable to (China’s) hybrid trade threat to US national security, not the US government, which engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in an effort to find an alternative solution.” “.
TikTok has said the divestment is “not technologically, commercially or legally possible.” TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes said in a statement that the company would appeal the decision to the country’s highest court.
“The Supreme Court has an established record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we hope it will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” he said. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed based on inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. “The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of more than 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19, 2025.”
TikTok has faced an avalanche of lawsuits, congressional hearings and investigations at both the federal and state levels over the past few years. It peaked in April when Joe Biden signed a bill requiring ByteDance to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner or be banned in January. In 2023, Montana became the first state to ban TikTok, but a judge blocked the state law before it could take effect.
TikTok first filed this lawsuit against the justice department in May. The court’s three-judge panel said the law’s provisions aimed at enforcement “survive constitutional scrutiny.”
Ginsburg wrote that the measure “was the culmination of extensive bipartisan action by Congress and successive presidents. “It was carefully crafted to address control by a foreign adversary only, and was part of a broader effort to counter a well-founded national security threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).”
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The US government says TikTok is a national security threat because China could use the app to access personal data of millions of Americans. Lawmakers also say they fear China could manipulate what millions of people see on the app and spread propaganda. The government has not revealed evidence that Beijing or ByteDance did so.
“The Chinese Communist Party has made it very clear that it is willing to leverage technology to collect data on our children and all American citizens,” said Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, in a statement when the bill was introduced last March. “It’s time we fight back against TikTok’s information invasion of American families.”
In May, ByteDance, TikTok and a group of social media influencers sued to block the law. They argue that it is unconstitutional, unfairly singles out the social media company and violates the right to free speech of its millions of users.
TikTok has 170 million American users on its platform, about half of the country’s population. Although its parent company is based in China, TikTok maintains that it is not under Chinese influence because it operates separately and has headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles. It says that its American users’ data is handled by Oracle, an American company.
Several civil and digital rights organizations have opposed the ban, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology. in a letter to congress Last March, they wrote that a privacy law would do more to protect people’s data. They said the bill to ban TikTok “is censorship, plain and simple.”
During oral arguments in the case in September, the appeals court’s three-judge panel heard arguments from both sides. One of the judges, Sri Srinivasan, said he was concerned that TikTok was owned by a foreign entity that had the ability to access large amounts of data on American citizens.
“When it’s a foreign organization, they don’t have a First Amendment right to object to a regulation of their healing,” he said. He later argued that ByteDance’s divestment from TikTok could solve this problem.