President-elect Donald Trump will formally take office for his second term at an inauguration ceremony in January after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

A TikTok ban could go into effect the day before the Jan. 20 inauguration — a move that, according to the social media platform, “will reflect the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the U.S. and around the world on January 19, 2025.” will silence.”

A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban, handing the popular social media platform a resounding defeat in its fight for survival in the United States. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected TikTok’s petition to overturn the law – which requires TikTok to cut ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January – and dismissed the law’s challenge Company back It was argued that it violated the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment is designed to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, written by Justice Douglas Ginsburg. “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.”

TikTok and ByteDance – another plaintiff in the lawsuit – are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, although it is unclear whether the court will take up the case.

Although the case is directly before the courts, it’s also possible that the two companies will be thrown some kind of lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok in his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he would now is against such an approach.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over the short-video sharing app that the government sees as a threat to national security because of its ties to China.

The US has said it is concerned that TikTok is collecting vast amounts of user data, including sensitive information about viewing habits, which could end up in the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned that the proprietary algorithm that drives what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to alter content on the platform in ways that are difficult to detect — a concern also expressed by the European Union on Friday as it investigates the video-sharing app’s role in Romania’s elections.

TikTok, which sued the government in May over the law, has long denied that it could be used by Beijing to spy or manipulate Americans. Its lawyers have correctly pointed out that the U.S. has not provided evidence that the company shared user data with the Chinese government or manipulated content in the U.S. to benefit Beijing. The Justice Department emphasized that it was citing, in part, unspecified actions that the Both companies have allegedly taken action in the past following demands from the Chinese government.

To allay concerns about the company’s owners, TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to improve protections for U.S. user data.

The company has also argued that the administration’s broader concerns could have been addressed in a draft contract it presented to the Biden administration during talks between the two sides more than two years ago. She accuses the government of refraining from further negotiations on the agreement, which the Justice Ministry believes is inadequate.

Lawyers for the two companies claimed that it was impossible to sell the platform commercially and technologically. They also say any sale of TikTok without its coveted algorithm — the platform’s secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block as part of a divestment plan — would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island separate from other global content .