Washington – A federal appeals court upheld a Law that will ban TikTok in the US If the Chinese parent company doesn’t sell its shares in the app in the coming months, it will represent another setback for the widely used video-sharing service in its battle with the federal government.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously sided with the Justice Department and declined to consider the request for relief from TikTok and ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, on the grounds that Law is constitutional.

“We conclude that the portions of the statute that petitioners may challenge, namely the provisions relating to TikTok and its affiliates, withstand constitutional scrutiny,” Senior Justice Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “We therefore reject the petitions.”

Congress agreed a foreign aid package in April These included provisions that gave TikTok nine months to cut ties with ByteDance or quickly lose access to app stores and web hosting services in US President Biden signed the billand it is scheduled to take effect on January 19, with the possibility of a one-time 90-day delay granted by the president if a sale is underway by then.

President-elect Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok in his first term, but changed his position during the presidential campaign and promised to “save” the app. He will take office on January 20th.

Lawmakers and national security officials have long had suspicions about TikTok’s ties to China. Officials from both parties have warned that the Chinese government could use TikTok to spy on and collect data from its roughly 170 million American users or to secretly influence the U.S. public by amplifying or suppressing certain content. The concern is legitimate, they argued, because Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate in intelligence gathering.

The appeals court decision sets off a Supreme Court battle over the law’s ultimate fate. The parties asked the justices to make a decision by Friday so that the Supreme Court has enough time to consider the case before the law takes effect. The justices could agree to hear the case and pause proceedings while they consider the legal arguments, or allow the appeals court’s decision to be the final word.

TikTok expects the law to be overturned by the Supreme Court, according to spokesman Michael Hughes, who argued the law is based on “inaccurate, erroneous and hypothetical information.”

“The Supreme Court has a long history of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect it will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” Hughes said in a statement.

The Justice Ministry, meanwhile, welcomed the decision.

“Today’s decision is an important step in preventing the Chinese government from weaponizing TikTok to collect sensitive information about millions of Americans, secretly manipulating the content delivered to American audiences, and undermining our national security,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “As the D.C. Circuit recognized, this law protects the national security of the United States in a manner consistent with the Constitution. The Justice Department is committed to protecting Americans’ sensitive data from authoritarian regimes that seek to exploit companies under their control.”

The court’s decision

“The First Amendment is designed to protect free speech in the United States,” Ginsburg wrote in his opinion. “Here, the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to restrict that adversary’s ability to collect data about people in the United States.”

The appeals court said it acknowledged the decision would have a “significant impact” on TikTok and its users.

“Consequently, the millions of TikTok users must find alternative communication media,” Ginsburg said. “This burden is due to (the People’s Republic of China’s) hybrid commercial threat to U.S. national security, not the U.S. government, which has worked with TikTok in a multi-year process to find an alternative solution.”

The D.C. Circuit found that the government’s national security justifications for banning TikTok — to counter China’s efforts to collect Americans’ data and limit its ability to surreptitiously manipulate content on the platform — were “entirely impractical.” “Consistent” with the First Amendment.

“The multi-year efforts of both political branches to examine the national security risks posed by the TikTok platform and consider potential remedies proposed by TikTok make a strong case for the legislation,” Ginsburg wrote. “The government has presented compelling evidence that the law is narrowly tailored to protect national security.”

Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House China Committee, praised the decision, calling it “a loss for the Chinese community party” but expressed optimism about the app’s future in the United States

“I am optimistic that President Trump will facilitate an American takeover of TikTok to enable its continued use in the United States, and I look forward to welcoming the app to America under new ownership,” Moolenaar said in a statement Explanation.

The House China Committee led the bipartisan effort to pass the bill.

The legal arguments

TikTok and ByteDance submitted a legal challenge in May, the law called it “an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” based on “speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation” that would stifle the speech of millions of Americans.

“In reality, there is no choice,” the petition said, adding that a forced sale “is simply not possible: neither commercially, technologically, nor legally.”

The Chinese government promised to block sales of the TikTok algorithm, which creates tailored content recommendations for each user. A new buyer would be forced to rebuild the algorithm that powers the app. Lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance said “such a fundamental restructuring would not be remotely feasible given the limitations contained in the legislation.”

“The platform consists of millions of lines of software code, painstakingly developed by thousands of engineers over several years,” the petition states.

During oral arguments in September, the appeals panel was skeptical of TikTok’s argument that free speech was more important than national security concerns, but the three justices were also critical of the government’s stance.

TikTok’s attorney, Andrew Pincus, said the law was “unprecedented and its impact would be staggering.”

“This law imposes an extraordinary ban on speech based on unspecified future risks,” Pincus said. “Despite the obvious, less restrictive alternatives, the government does not come close to strict control.”

Judge Sri Srinivasan said that under TikTok’s reasoning, the U.S. cannot prohibit a foreign country from owning a major media company in the U.S. when the two are at war.

“Are you saying that Congress cannot rule out the enemy’s ownership of a major media source in the United States?” Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, asked Pincus.

When Pincus noted that news outlets like Politico and Business Insider are owned by foreign companies, Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, quickly chimed in: “But not foreign adversaries.”

Rao also rejected Pincus’ argument that Congress did not include evidence in the legislation to support his claims that TikTok posed a national security risk.

“I know Congress doesn’t always legislate, but they did here,” she said. “They actually passed a law, and a lot of your arguments want us to treat them as an agency. That’s strange. It’s a very strange framework to think about our first branch of government.”

Attorney Jeffrey Fisher, who represents TikTok creators, likened TikTok’s restrictions to the U.S. government hypothetically banning bookstores from selling books written by foreign authors in collaboration with a foreign government.

“We are not talking about banning Tocqueville in the United States,” Rao replied. “We’re talking about the political establishment determining that there is a foreign adversary that may be exerting covert influence in the United States. Completely different.”

Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, expressed skepticism about the idea that the law excludes TikTok.

“It describes a category of companies, all owned or controlled by opposing powers, and subjects a company to an immediate necessity,” he said, noting that the company and the government have been engaged in unsuccessful negotiations for years to to try to find a solution to the national security concerns. “This is the only company that is in this situation.”

Justice Department lawyer Daniel Tenny said the data on Americans that could be collected through the app “would be very valuable to a foreign adversary if they were trying to target an American to use them as an intelligence agent.” .” Tenny also spoke about the danger of content manipulation by China.

“The target is a foreign company that controls this recommendation engine and many aspects of the algorithm used to determine what content is shown to Americans on the app,” Tenny said.

But Srinivasan said it is Americans’ choice to use the app, regardless of what content may appear.

“The fact that this is denied subjects this to serious constitutional scrutiny,” he said.

He later added: “What gives questionable force to the other side’s First Amendment argument is that it is not just about the government targeting curation that occurs abroad. It is the reason curation that occurs abroad is being targeted, and the reason is concern about the substantive consequences of that curation in the United States.”