Law banning TikTok is upheld by appeals court
The clock is ticking.
A federal appeals court rejected TikTok’s petition to overturn the law that may lead to a ban on the popular social-media platform within months.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court said in its opinion. “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.”
There are certainly question marks that remain, like whether TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance could make a deal to transfer the app to US ownership before the deadline, and how President-elect Donald Trump, who has professed his love for the platform during this campaign, would treat the app once he’s in office. But as it stands, without a divestiture, the law is set to ban TikTok on January 19, one day before Trump is inaugurated in Washington.
It’s unclear what this will mean for rival tech companies that have short-form video posts, like Meta and Alphabet’s YouTube.
There are certainly question marks that remain, like whether TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance could make a deal to transfer the app to US ownership before the deadline, and how President-elect Donald Trump, who has professed his love for the platform during this campaign, would treat the app once he’s in office. But as it stands, without a divestiture, the law is set to ban TikTok on January 19, one day before Trump is inaugurated in Washington.
It’s unclear what this will mean for rival tech companies that have short-form video posts, like Meta and Alphabet’s YouTube.
