TikTok Urges Court To Halt Ban From Taking Effect Until Supreme Court Can Review Case

After a federal appeals court held that a law that would force TikTok to divest from its Communist Chinese ownership or face a nationwide ban is constitutional, the popular video-sharing app is urging the court to halt the law from taking effect until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in.The District of Columbia Circuit on Friday found that the divest-or-ban law does not infringe on First Amendment freedoms since the government’s law acts 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, and its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, warn in an emergency petition that if the law is allowed to take effect on January 19, 2025, “one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms,” used by tens of millions of Americans each month, will be shut down “on the eve of a presidential inauguration.” It argues that the Supreme Court should be able to weigh in on “this exceptionally important case” before such a ban takes effect.“TikTok is, at its core, its 170 million American users,” the platform noted in a statement. “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 TikTok Ban is halted.”In its legal filing, lawyers for TikTok argue that an injunction will not cause any harm for the government as there is no “imminent threat” to national security. They argue that Congress’s own law making the ban effective months after its passage, as well as the government admitting that China “‘could” engage in certain harmful conduct through TikTok, not that China is currently doing so or will soon do so,” makes it clear that there is not an urgent threat.Delaying enactment of the law would “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,” the filing notes. The federal government has promised its full response by Wednesday, but in the meantime, noted in a legal filing that the government believes the court should deny TikTok’s request “without additional briefing.”“The Court is familiar with the relevant facts and law and has definitively rejected petitioners’ constitutional claims in a thorough decision that recognizes the critical national-security interests underlying the Act,” the government wrote in a filing.

TikTok Urges Court To Halt Ban From Taking Effect Until Supreme Court Can Review Case

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