After an appeals court on Friday rejected a bid for more time, TikTok must move quickly by asking the Supreme Court to block or overturn a law requiring its Chinese parent ByteDance to decommission the short-video app by January 19.
TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Monday, seeking more time to present their case to the US Supreme Court.
The companies warned that without court action, the law would “shut down one of the country’s most popular speech platforms — TikTok — for its 170 million domestic monthly users.”
But the court rejected the bid, saying TikTok and ByteDance did not recognize a previous case “in which a court, after dismissing a constitutional challenge to an act of Congress, has ordered the act to apply while seeking review at the Supreme Court,” the unanimous court order on Friday said.
A TikTok spokesperson said after the ruling that the company plans to take its case to the Supreme Court, “which has a historic record of protecting Americans’ rights to free speech.”
Under the law, TikTok will be banned until ByteDance divests it by January 19. The law also gives the US government broad powers to ban other foreign-owned apps that raise concerns about Americans’ data collection.
The US Department of Justice argues that “continued Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security.”
TikTok said the Justice Department mischaracterized the social media app’s ties to China, arguing its content recommendation engine and user data are stored on cloud servers operated by Oracle in the US while content moderation decisions that affect US users are made in the United States.
The decision — unless the Supreme Court overturns it — puts TikTok’s fate in the hands of first Democratic President Joe Biden on whether to extend the Jan. 19 deadline of 90 days to force the sale, and then Republican President-elect Donald Trump. Trump, who takes office on January 20.
Trump, who tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, said before November’s presidential election that he would not allow a ban on TikTok.
Also on Friday, the chairman and top Democrat on a US House of Representatives committee on China told the CEOs of Google-parent Alphabet and Apple that they should be ready to remove TikTok from their US app stores on January 19.
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