TikTok loses emergency bid to delay sale

Ban set to go ahead unless new owner found or President extends deadline

US appeals court has rejected TikTok's attempt to temporarily block the law demanding that parent company ByteDance divests of its interest in the popular video app by 19th January or face an outright ban in the US.

TikTok and ByteDance on filed the emergency motion with the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia early last week, asking for more time to make their case to the US Supreme Court. It argued that the Supreme Court needed more time to determine whether it should review the law.

ByteDance lost its bid to block the sale earlier this month when a federal court threw out its claims that a ban was unconstitutional and violated American’s first amendment rights.

Friday’s ruling means that TikTok now must quickly go to the Supreme Court if it wants to attempt to halt the pending ban which will come into force on 19th January unless ByteDance divests its interest.

President Biden passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was part of a massive, $95 billion foreign aid package passed by Congress, on April 24.

As part of the act, TikTok, which has over 170 million users in the US, is forced to sell the company from its current Chinese-based owner ByteDance.

President Biden and some congressional leaders have argued that the ultimatum against TikTok was necessary because of security concerns about ByteDance, specifically regarding its connections to the Chinese government and the threat that relationship potentially poses towards US national security.

Part of the concern about the new law is that in addition to the potential TikTok ban, it also gives the US government sweeping powers to ban other foreign-owned apps on the basis of concern about collection of Americans’ data.

TikTok says the DoJ has misstated the social media app’s ties to China, arguing its content-recommendation engine and user data are stored in the US on cloud servers operated by Oracle while content-moderation decisions that affect US users are made in the US.

American TikTok devotees have strongly defended their right to use the app.

The decision – unless the Supreme Court reverses it – puts TikTok’s fate first in the hands of President Biden on whether to grant a 90-day extension of the 19 January deadline to force a sale, and then of President-elect Trump, who takes office on 20 January.

His previously hawkish stance on China included proposing a TikTok ban when he was in first in office, but he has since changed his stance and indicated that he would reverse a ban once in office. A reversal would require approval from both houses of Congress.