A federal appeals court cited national security concerns on Friday when it upheld a law requiring China-based ByteDance to sell popular social media app TikTok next month or face an effective ban in the United States.

The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, was rejected TikTok’s argument that the law is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use the app.

TikTok said later on Friday that it would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s decision.

If ByteDance fails to sell TikTok by January 19, the law would affect app store companies such as Apple And Googleand internet hosting providers to stop supporting TikTok, which would effectively ban the app.

President Joe Biden signed the law in April after members of Congress from both parties raised concerns about TikTok’s alleged ties to the communist Chinese government. Rep. Troy Balderson, R-Ohio, in March, called TikTok “a surveillance tool used by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on Americans and collect highly personal information.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not said whether he will enforce the ban when he takes office next month.

The appeals court noted in its majority opinion Friday that the U.S. government had presented “compelling evidence that” the divestment law was “narrowly tailored to protect national security.”

The statement said that TikTok “never clearly denies that it has ever manipulated content at the direction of the ‘People’s Republic of China.’

“On the merits, we reject all of petitioners’ constitutional claims,” Justice Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the opinion.

“As we will explain, the portions of the law properly before this court do not violate the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States or the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws; “They constitute an unlawful act of the assassin … or commit a gratuitous expropriation of private property in violation of the Fifth Amendment,” the statement said.

Ginsburg noted that the law was the result of “extensive, bipartisan action by Congress and successive presidents.”

“It was carefully crafted to address only control by a foreign adversary and was part of a broader effort to counter a well-founded national security threat posed by the PRC,” the judge wrote.

In a statement posted on

“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was designed and enforced based on inaccurate, erroneous and hypothetical information, resulting in total censorship of the American people,” the company said. “The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the United States and around the world on January 19, 2025.”

Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, condemned Friday’s ruling, saying it sets “a flawed and dangerous precedent that gives the government far too much power to silence Americans’ speech online.” bring”.

“The ban on TikTok blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use this app to express themselves and communicate with people around the world,” Toomey said. “The government cannot shut down an entire communications platform unless it poses extremely serious and imminent harm, and there is no evidence of that here.”

Although TikTok has announced that it will refer the decision to the US Supreme Court, there is no automatic right to appeal to that court.

A source close to the company who was not authorized to speak publicly told NBC News that the company will seek an injunction pending a planned petition to have the Supreme Court take up the case.

In a September post on his own social media app Truth Social, Trump wrote that he was “not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side is going to shut it down.”

“So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump,” the now president-elect wrote at the time.

Trump’s transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNBC in November that the president-elect would “make good” on his campaign promises.

CNBC has reached out to Trump’s transition team for comment on Friday’s ruling and his plans for TikTok.

Trump’s position on TikTok could be influenced by other factors.

The president-elect tried to ban the app during his first term.

But his rhetoric on TikTok began to change after he met in February with billionaire Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor and major investor in Bytedance.

Yass’s trading company, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass holds a 7% stake in the company, worth about $21 billion, NBC and CNBC reported in March. This month it was also reported that Yass was a partner in the company that merged with Trump’s parent company Truth Social.