A federal appeals court upheld a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app by January 19 or be banned in the United States.
A panel of three judges ruled that Congress has the authority to take action against the social media app, rejecting ByteDance’s arguments concerning the First Amendment.
“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “We therefore deny the petitions.”
Congress has argued that TikTok is a national security concern.
“The multi-year efforts of both political branches to investigate the national security risks posed by the TikTok platform, and to consider potential remedies proposed by TikTok, weigh heavily in favor of the Act,” the court said.
“We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users. Unless TikTok executes a qualified divestiture by January 19, 2025 — or the President grants a 90-day extension based upon progress towards a qualified divestiture, § 2(a)(3) — its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time,” the court added, noting that TikTok users will “need to find alternative media of communication.”
“That burden is attributable to the PRC’s hybrid commercial threat to U.S. national security, not to the U.S. Government, which engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in an effort to find an alternative solution.”
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court explained. “Here the Government acted 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.”
President Joe Biden signed a law in April that gave ByteDance 270 days from enactment to sell the app.
