With more than 170 million Americans using the social media app, TikTok’s Chinese owner needs to sell the business or shutter it by January.
TikTok is one step closer to disappearing in the United States after a panel of federal judges on Friday unanimously upheld a new law that could ban the popular Chinese-owned video app by mid-January.
The judges disagreed with TikTok’s argument. They said the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary” and didn’t violate the First Amendment. “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement. He called the ban “outright censorship of the American people.”
“The Supreme Court, not wanting to see this app go dark on January 19, will freeze the law, and then this gets handed over to the Trump administration and a Trump Department of Justice to figure out what they want to do,” he said. But, he added: “Congress judged it necessary to assume that risk given the grave national-security threats it perceived. And because the record reflects that Congress’ decision was considered, consistent with long-standing regulatory practice, and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, we are not in a position to set it aside.”
The law also gives the president the authority to decide whether a sale or a similar transaction successfully removes TikTok from “foreign adversary” control. Some experts speculated that ByteDance could make some structural changes to appease those requirements. If Trump blessed them, he could allow the app to continue operating in the United States.
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