BREAKING: Federal court upholds TikTok ban

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld on Friday that the US could ban TikTok over concerns with National Security. The law forces the divestment of Chinese company ByteDance from the social media platform.  

According to the Wall Street Journal, a panel of three judges ruled that Congress has the authority to take action against TikTok and rejected concerns over the First Amendment. The law is set to take effect in January. The case may get appealed to the Supreme Court. 

TikTok sued the federal government over free speech protections in retaliation to the ban that was passed in Congress earlier this year. The law stated that unless the Chinese company ByteDance sells the social media app to an American company TikTok will be banned in the US.  

The ruling from the court stated that because of TikTok’s “expensive reach,” Congress was able to determine that with China’s influence the law "is essential to protect our national security." 

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. 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. For these reasons the petitions are denied,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the decision.  

“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 — its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time,” the decision added. 

“Consequently, TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication,” the court continued. “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."