Given that it will be banned in the USA on January 19, TikTok intends to file another appeal. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals denied a temporary stay of TikTok’s ban on Friday, stating that the block was “unwarranted.” This decision opens the door for the Supreme Court to potentially make a decision regarding the future of the well-known video-sharing app.
A bill signed into law by President Joe Biden in April mandated that Beijing-based ByteDance sell TikTok to a non-Chinese business. Citing national security reasons, the same appeals court upheld the statute last week, and this latest verdict comes after that decision.
The corporation might be able to wait months to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, thus stopping the law indefinitely, according to the Biden administration’s earlier plea to the appeals court not to place a temporary ban on the statute.
In a statement released on December 6, TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes stated, “We expect the Supreme Court to uphold Americans’ right to free speech, as they have done historically.”
In this instance, the Supreme Court could conclude quickly. The federal government and TikTok had earlier requested that the appeals court accelerate its decision in order to allow for an appeal prior to the January 19 ban.
According to Josh Schiller, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority of six justices, is likely to sustain the ban, he told CNN earlier this month.
“I find it difficult to believe that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would not consider this to be a case involving (national) security,” Schiller stated.
Earlier this month, Cornell Law School professor and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic Gautam Hans told CNN that TikTok would be in a bad position if the Supreme Court decided not to examine the issue at all.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice stated that should the ban be implemented, it would “not directly prohibit the continued use of TikTok” for the more than 170 million people who use the app each month. However, if the app is banned, don’t expect to see any more updates or be able to download it.
The CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, received a bipartisan letter from two heads of the US House of Representatives committee on China advising them to get ready to remove TikTok from their US app stores on January 19.
Moreover, TikTok will not be accessible on web hosting sites. According to the Justice Department, users should anticipate that the software will “eventually” become unfeasible.
TikTok may yet be able to survive in the US, despite ByteDance’s prior announcement that it will not be selling the app.
The statute underpinning the embargo allows Biden to give a 90-day one-time extension if he thinks a company has moved closer to a sale. He hasn’t made any indication that he intends to.
Potential supporters of TikTok include President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office the day following the ban. In a video uploaded to the app in July, he declared that he would “never ban TikTok”—despite having attempted to do so during his first tenure.
A few choices are available: Trump may request that Congress overturn the legislation, but analysts say it is unlikely to happen. Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told CNN last month that he may also order the attorney general to halt the enforcement of the legislation or declare TikTok exempt from it.
