Sell or Be Banned: Court Decides TikTok’s Fate
By Movieguide® Contributor
A federal appeals court decided last week that TikTok must be banned or sold.
“The ruling is a big setback for the popular video-sharing platform, which has been in an ongoing battle with the federal government since 2022,” Relevant reported. “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously to deny TikTok and ByteDance’s petition for relief, declaring the law constitutional.”
“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny,” Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg said. “We therefore deny the petitions.”
ByteDance has until Jan. 19 to sell the app. Congress allows for one 90-day extension if a sale is in progress during that time.
Congress officials have expressed security concerns about TikTok since 2022. The main concerns are TikTok collecting data from millions of users and suppressing or magnifying certain content to sway public opinion. Chinese security laws stipulate that organizations must cooperate with their intelligence agendas.
TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean, has claimed that ByteDance is “not an agent of China or any other country.”
Judge Ginsburg wrote in the court’s opinion that TikTok “never squarely denies that it has ever manipulated content at the direction of” the Chinese government.
“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny,” he said. “We therefore deny the petitions.”
The decision upholds a law passed by Congress in April as part of a broader foreign assistance package. This legislation gives TikTok nine months to sever ties with ByteDance or face removal from U.S. app stores and web-hosting platforms. President Biden quickly signed the bill into law, setting a Jan. 19 deadline for compliance, with the possibility of a one-time 90-day extension if a sale is actively in progress.
READ MORE: WILL TIKTOK BE BANNED? WE’LL SOON FIND OUT.
The company tried to argue that free speech was being violated through the ban, with no success.
“The ban has also reignited a debate over free speech and national security. TikTok’s legal team insists that a forced sale is impractical and would effectively dismantle the app’s complex algorithm, which relies on millions of lines of code developed over years by thousands of engineers,” Relevant reported. “During oral arguments, TikTok’s lawyer, Andrew Pincus, called the law unprecedented, stating, ‘This law imposes extraordinary speech prohibition based on indeterminate future risks.’”
But the appeals court acted in the country’s best interest.
“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,” Ginsburg wrote.
Relevant said, “The ruling sets the stage for a potential showdown at the Supreme Court. TikTok has already signaled its intent to appeal, and the justices could decide to review the case and pause the law’s implementation. If not, the ban will take effect early next year, leaving millions of American users in search of alternative platforms.”
TikTok asked the appeals court to pause the law until it gets a ruling from the Supreme Court.
“The pause would give the incoming Trump administration time to weigh in on the legal dispute, arguing President-elect Donald Trump’s position ‘could moot both the impending harms and the need for Supreme Court review,” Forbes reported.
TikTok asked the court to decide by Dec. 16.
“A modest delay in enforcing the Act will simply create breathing room for the Supreme Court to conduct an orderly review and for the incoming Administration to evaluate this matter—before one of this country’s most important speech platforms is shuttered,” TikTok said in its filing.
READ MORE: CANADA SHUTS DOWN TIKTOK BUSINESS OPERATIONS IN COUNTRY — HERE’S WHY
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