TikTok‘s battle to stop its ban in the U.S. hit another roadblock.
On Friday, a federal appeals court panel unanimously upheld the Biden-era law that gave ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, nine months to either get a new owner or be banned in the U.S. The deadline is looming; unless the courts stop it, it will go into effect the day before President-elect Donald Trump takes the Oval Office.
A ban would require app stores like Apple and Google and internet hosting companies to stop distributing or updating the TikTok app or face penalties.
The company argued that the law violates First Amendment rights to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement to Reuters that it sets a “flawed and dangerous precedent.”
“Banning TikTok blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use this app to express themselves and communicate with people around the world,” Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told Reuters.
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But that argument didn’t quite work in court.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg, read, according to the Associated Press. “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.”
TikTok is expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, but we don’t yet know if the court will accept it. If the decision does make it all the way up the justice system, TikTok is confident the court will side with them.
“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,” TikTok said in a statement to Reuters.
This is just the latest in the constant battle over TikTok on the U.S. political playground that began in 2019, with a barrage of bills attempting to limit TikTok’s reach. The fear, politicians argued, is that TikTok poses a national security threat because its parent company is based out of China and subject to Chinese intelligence laws which could, theoretically and hypothetically, force ByteDance to give its data with China.
TikTok has consistently denied this claim, but that hasn’t stopped everything from national bans to state-wide bans. And the most recent move is affecting more than just TikTok itself: Meta shares, for instance, rose 2.4 percent after the court upheld the law on Friday.
