The appeals court did not postpone the blocking of TikTok in the US from January 19 – Apple and Google were told to get ready

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has rejected TikTok’s request to temporarily suspend or overturn a law that requires the Chinese company ByteDance to abandon the platform under threat of blocking it in the country.

Image source: Solen Feyissa / unsplash.com

Last Monday, TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency motion with the Court of Appeals asking for more time to send the case to the US Supreme Court. The two companies warned that without due process, the law would serve as the basis for “shutting down TikTok, one of the nation’s most popular public speaking platforms, for its more than 170 million local monthly users.”

The court rejected the motion, saying TikTok and ByteDance had cited no precedent “in which a court, having rejected a constitutional challenge to a law passed by Congress, would block the law from taking effect while the Supreme Court sought review.” This law states that TikTok will be banned in the US if ByteDance does not abandon the platform by January 19; It also gives the U.S. government broad authority to ban other foreign apps that may raise concerns about collecting data belonging to American citizens.

According to the US Department of Justice, the fact that “China’s control over the TikTok application poses an ongoing threat to national security.” The TikTok administration insists that the Justice Department misinterprets the nature of the social network’s connection with China: user data and the content recommendation algorithm are hosted on Oracle servers, and moderator decisions affecting American users are made in the United States.

If the Supreme Court does not overturn the law, the fate of TikTok will be in the hands of current US President Joe Biden, who may give 90 days on January 19 to alienate the platform from ByteDance. At the same time, Donald Trump takes office as head of state on January 20. During his first tenure as president, Trump unsuccessfully tried to block TikTok, but last November, before the election, he said he would not allow the platform to be blocked. The day before, the chairman of the US House Committee on China told representatives of Alphabet (which owns Google) and Apple that they should be prepared to remove TikTok from their app stores on January 19.