TikTok has officially appealed to the US Supreme Court for a temporary pause to an incoming law that could see the app banned in the market if it’s not divested from parent company ByteDance.
In an emergency motion filed on Monday (December 16), lawyers for TikTok invoked the First Amendment, arguing that “Congress has enacted a massive and unprecedented speech restriction” by targeting the app via the introduction of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in April 2024.
In a statement published to its website on Monday, TikTok said: “The Supreme Court has an established record of upholding Americans’ right to free speech” and that it is “asking the Court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the First Amendment”.
TikTok has more than 170 million monthly American users.
The emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court arrives on the heels of a warning issued by US lawmakers to Google and Apple on Friday (December 13) to prepare to remove TikTok from their app stores by January 19, 2025, if its China-headquartered parent company ByteDance hasn’t sold the platform by that date.
President-elect Donald Trump weighed into the debate about TikTok’s future in the US on Monday, stating during a press conference that he has “a warm spot in [his] heart” for the app. He suggested that the app had an impact on his share of the youth vote during the recent election.
The latest developments in the high-stakes battle between US lawmakers and the social video app follow the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s (DC Circuit) decision last Friday (December 6) to reject TikTok’s legal challenge to the law.
Last Monday (December 9), TikTok and its parent company ByteDance filed an emergency motion with the Appeals court, asking for a temporary injunction to delay the law. The US Justice Department on Thursday (December 12) urged the court to deny the motion. On Friday (December 13), the Appeals court did just that, with TikTok now seeking relief in the Supreme Court.
TikTok says in the latest emergency motion filed with the Supreme Court that the app “is an online platform that is one of the Nation’s most popular and important venues for communication”. The filing adds that the app is “provided in [the US]” by TikTok Inc., an American company that is indirectly owned by ByteDance Ltd., a Cayman holding company majority-owned by institutional investors”.
Lawyers for TikTok argue in the filing, which you can read here, that because TikTok Inc. “is a US company exercising editorial discretion over a US speech platform, the First Amendment fully protects it from Congress’s attempt to ban its operation of the platform based on its purported susceptibility to foreign influence”.
The filing continues: “Strict scrutiny applies here just as it would if Congress banned a specified American citizen from operating a particular American newspaper merely because a foreign nation might be able to control what he printed or misuse his subscriber data.”
The deadline for TikTok to be divested from ByteDance or face a ban in the US market is one day before the Presidential inauguration on January 20.
In Monday’s filing, TikTok argues that “an interim injunction is also appropriate because it will give the incoming Administration time to determine its position, as the President-elect and his advisors have voiced support for saving TikTok.”
The company also argues that “a modest delay in enforcing the Act will create breathing room for [the Supreme Court] to conduct an orderly review and the new Administration to evaluate this matter — before this vital channel for Americans to communicate with their fellow citizens and the world is closed”.Music Business Worldwide