The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has rejected TikTok’s request to temporarily suspend or overturn a law that would require Chinese company ByteDance to abandon the platform or risk having it blocked in the country.
Image source: Solen Feyissa / unsplash.com
Last Monday, TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency motion with the Court of Appeals asking for more time to send the case to the US Supreme Court. The two companies warned that without due process, the law would lead to “closing TikTok, one of the country’s most popular platforms for public speaking, to its more than 170 million local monthly users.”.
The court rejected the petition, saying that TikTok and ByteDance did not provide a single precedent, “in which the court, having rejected a constitutional challenge to a law passed by Congress, would block the law from taking effect while the Supreme Court seeks to review it”. This law states that TikTok will be banned in the US if ByteDance does not abandon the platform by January 19; it also gives the U.S. government broad authority to ban other foreign apps that may raise concerns about collecting data belonging to American citizens.
According to the US Department of Justice, the fact that “China’s control over the TikTok application poses an ongoing threat to national security.” The TikTok administration insists that the Justice Department misinterprets the nature of the social network’s connection with China: user data and the content recommendation algorithm are hosted on Oracle servers, and moderator decisions affecting American users are made in the United States.
If the Supreme Court does not overturn the law, the fate of TikTok will be in the hands of current US President Joe Biden, who may give 90 days on January 19 to alienate the platform from ByteDance. At the same time, Donald Trump takes office as head of state on January 20. During his first tenure as president, Trump unsuccessfully tried to block TikTok, but last November, before the election, he said he would not allow the platform to be blocked. The day before, the chairman of the US House Committee on China told representatives of Alphabet (owns Google) and Apple that they should be prepared to remove TikTok from their app stores on January 19.
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL+ENTER.
