TikTok filed an appeal with the Supreme Court seeking an emergency injunction to block a U.S. law from going into effect that would impose a nationwide ban on the popular app unless its Chinese parent sells its stake in TikTok.
In a statement Monday, TikTok said, “The Supreme Court has an established record of upholding Americans’ right to free speech. Today, we are asking the Court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the First Amendment.” The company continued, “The TikTok ban results in a massive and unprecedented censorship of over 170 million Americans on January 19, 2025. Estimates show that small businesses on TikTok would lose more than $1 billion in revenue and creators would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings in just one month unless the ban is halted.”
On Dec. 6, the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a federal law that will ban TikTok in the country over national security concerns — unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells its interest in the app by Jan. 19, 2025. In the ruling, the three-judge panel found that national security risks outweighed the argument put forth by TikTok and ByteDance that the law violates the First Amendment rights of millions of the video app’s users.
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Donald Trump, at a press conference Monday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, was asked what he would do about the TikTok law. He responded that “We’ll take a look at TikTok.”
“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth [voters] by 34 points, and there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it,” he said. Trump’s claim that he “won youth” in the 2024 election is not true: Among 18-29-year-old voters, Trump was 11 points below VP Kamala Harris, according to exit polls compiled by CNN.
Trump, during his first term as president, was unsuccessful in his efforts to force ByteDance to sell majority control in TikTok to U.S. owners. But in March, Trump posted on Truth Social, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” calling Facebook “a true Enemy of the People!” In a CNBC interview in March, Trump agreed that TikTok’s Chinese ties represent “a national security risk” but reiterated his point that a U.S. ban on the app would only help Facebook.
The D.C. Circuit ruled that the First Amendment objections raised by TikTok and ByteDance in their lawsuit looking to overturn the law were outweighed by national security concerns. “While the court today decides that the Act’s divestment mandate survives a First Amendment challenge, that is not without regard for the significant interests at stake on all sides,” the D.C. Circuit wrote in the decision. “Some 170 million Americans use TikTok to create and view all sorts of free expression and engage with one another and the world. And yet, in part precisely because of the platform’s expansive reach, Congress and multiple Presidents determined that divesting it from the [People’s Republic of China’s] control is essential to protect our national security.”
The D.C. Circuit ruled that the law, called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, does “not target speech based upon its communicative content. The TikTok-specific provisions instead straightforwardly require only that TikTok divest its platform as a precondition to operating in the United States.” According to the court, the U.S. government “has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security.”
The law specifies that, in the absence of a “qualified divestiture” by ByteDance, the TikTok ban will go into effect 270 days (nine months) after its enactment, which would be Jan. 19, 2025. In addition, the law gives the U.S. president the ability to grant a one-time extension of “not more than 90 days” if the president determines that ByteDance has a legitimate sales negotiation in progress to sell its TikTok stake. That would make the sell-or-ban date April 19, 2025.
President Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law on April 24, after it passed in Congress with solid bipartisan support. The legislation requires ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok to a party or parties not based in a country the U.S. designates a “foreign adversary” and if it doesn’t, the distribution of TikTok would be outlawed.
About 50% of Americans support a TikTok ban, while 32% oppose it and 18% are not sure, according to an Ipsos/Reuters survey earlier this year. Just 31% of those 18-34 say they are in favor of a ban, and 50% say they oppose it. Most Americans 35-54 (54%) and 55 and older (60%) say they support a ban of the app.