TikTok faces a major setback from the US Court of Appeals in its request to block the law that could ban the app in the country.
According to Reuters, TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, earlier this week filed an emergency motion in the appeals court of District Columbia to temporarily halt the law till they made their cases to the Supreme Court.
The company highlighted that the court action could stop the “shutdown” of TikTok, “one of the nation's most popular speech platforms, for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users."
However, the court on Friday, December 13, 2024, unanimously rejected that request, saying that the company and the social media app did not identify a previous case “in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court.”
Reacting to the court decision, a TikTok spokesperson said that the company will now take the case to the Supreme Court, “which has an established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free speech."
Furthermore, the law requires ByteDance to either divest TikTok by January 19, 2025, or face a ban. The law also gave the US government sweeping powers to ban other foreign-owned apps that are a threat to national security.
