TikTok must now move quickly with a request to the Supreme Court to block or overturn the law that would have required its Chinese parent ByteDance to shut down the short video app by January 19, when a Friday The appeal court had rejected the bid for more time.
Tik Tik and BiteDance filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Monday, asking for more time to present their case to the US Supreme Court.
The companies warned that without court action, the law would “shut down TikTok — one of the country’s most popular speech platforms — to its more than 170 million domestic monthly users.”
But the court rejected the bid, saying that TikTok and ByteDance did not point to a previous case “in which a court has ordered the act to go into effect after Congress rejected a constitutional challenge to it while the Supreme Court A review has been requested, Friday’s unanimous court order 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’ right to free speech.”
Under the law, TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance takes it down by January 19. The law also gives the U.S. government broad powers to ban other foreign-owned apps that may raise concerns about the collection of Americans’ data.
The US Department of Justice argues that “China’s continued control over the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security.”
TikTok says the Justice Department misrepresented the social media app’s ties to China, arguing that its content recommendation engine and user data were stored on cloud servers run by Oracle in the US. While content moderation decisions affecting American consumers are made in the United States.
The decision — unless the Supreme Court reverses it — puts TikTok’s fate in the hands of first Democratic President Joe Biden over whether to extend the Jan. 19 deadline to force the sale by 90 days, and then Republicans. President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office on January 20.
Trump, who tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, said before the November presidential election that he would not allow a ban on TikTok.
Also on Friday, the head of the US House of Representatives’ China Committee and the top Democrat told the CEO of Google parent Alphabet that he should be ready to remove TikTok from its US app stores on January 19.