Egypt Daily News – A US appeals court rejected an emergency request from the TikTok application to block a law requiring the Chinese company that owns the application, ByteDance, to withdraw its application from the United States by January 19 or face a ban.
TikTok and ByteDance submitted an emergency request to the Columbia Court of Appeals in the US state of North Carolina to obtain more time to present their case to the US Supreme Court. Yesterday Friday’s ruling means that TikTok must quickly go to the US Supreme Court in an attempt to prevent or overturn the law.
The two companies had said that the law, without judicial action, “will lead to the suspension of the TikTok application – one of the most popular expression platforms in the country – with more than 170 million monthly users.”
The court justified its rejection of the request by saying that the two companies did not specify a previous case “in which the court prevented a law issued by Congress, after rejecting the constitutional challenge to it, from entering into force while seeking consideration before the Supreme Court.”
A TikTok spokesman said that the company intends to present its case to the US Supreme Court, “which has a well-established historical record in protecting Americans’ right to freedom of expression.”
Under the law, TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance sells its stake in it by January 19. The law also gives the US government broad powers to ban other foreign-owned applications that may raise concerns about collecting Americans’ data.
The US Department of Justice says that “China’s continued control over the TikTok application constitutes an ongoing threat to national security.”
TikTok says that the US Department of Justice made false statements about the application’s connection to China, and said that the recommendation engine for TikTok content and user data is stored in the United States on cloud servers managed by Oracle, and that decisions to modify content that affect American users are also made in the United States. .
The law – unless overturned by the Supreme Court – puts the fate of TikTok in the hands of Democratic US President Joe Biden regarding whether he will grant a 90-day extension to the January 19 deadline to impose a sale on the company and then in the hands of Republican President-elect Donald Trump. Who will take office on January 20.
Trump, who tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, said before the presidential election in November that he would not allow TikTok to be banned.
Yesterday, Friday, the head of the US House of Representatives Committee on China informed the CEOs of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Apple, that they must prepare to remove TikTok from US app stores on January 19.
