A federal appeals court has upheld a law that will ban TikTok on Jan. 19, in the U.S. unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells its stake in the app.
The ruling is a big setback for the popular video-sharing platform, which has been in an ongoing battle with the federal government since 2022. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously to deny TikTok and ByteDance’s petition for relief, declaring the law constitutional.
“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,” Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the court’s opinion. “We therefore deny the petitions.”
The decision upholds a law passed by Congress in April as part of a broader foreign assistance package. This legislation gives TikTok nine months to sever ties with ByteDance or face removal from U.S. app stores and web-hosting platforms. President Biden quickly signed the bill into law, setting a Jan. 19 deadline for compliance, with the possibility of a one-time 90-day extension if a sale is actively in progress.
TikTok’s legal troubles are not new. Since 2022, officials in Congress have expressed concerns over the app’s ties to China and its potential misuse by the Chinese government. Representatives from both parties have expressed fears that the Chinese government could use TikTok to collect sensitive data from its estimated 170 million American users or manipulate public opinion by controlling the content shown on the platform. These worries stem from Chinese national security laws requiring organizations to cooperate with government intelligence operations.
However, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean, has repeatedly told Congress that the company is “not an agent of China or any other country.”
After the ban was initially announced, TikTok vowed to fight back. The company argues the law is unconstitutional and based on speculative concerns.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” said Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for TikTok.
The ban has also reignited a debate over free speech and national security. TikTok’s legal team insists that a forced sale is impractical and would effectively dismantle the app’s complex algorithm, which relies on millions of lines of code developed over years by thousands of engineers. During oral arguments, TikTok’s lawyer, Andrew Pincus, called the law unprecedented, stating, “This law imposes extraordinary speech prohibition based on indeterminate future risks.”
Despite TikTok’s objections, the appeals court sided with the government, citing significant national security concerns.
“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,” Ginsburg wrote.
The ruling sets the stage for a potential showdown at the Supreme Court. TikTok has already signaled its intent to appeal, and the justices could decide to review the case and pause the law’s implementation. If not, the ban will take effect early next year, leaving millions of American users in search of alternative platforms.
