New episode in the legal battle between the company that owns the platform TikTok and the US federal government. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington denied the Chinese company’s request ByteDance to stop the application of the law that provides for the ban of platforms whose ownership is linked to states “hostile” to the United States. A decision that continues the trend of American judges to force a change of hands of the controversial short video platform to prevent US user data from ending up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
A controversial decision
The majority opinion, written by Justice Douglas Ginsburg, an experienced and respected jurist appointed during the Reagan presidency, seems to put an end to the hopes of ByteDance to avoid that the rule approved by the Biden administration puts it faced with the obligation to sell a majority stake to avoid that TikTok be banned from smartphones in the US. “We conclude that the portions of the law that have been questioned by the other party, namely the provisions covering TikTok and the various entities related to them, are in accordance with the Constitution of the United States. This is why we deny the petition.”.
In reality, the 92-page sentence goes into detail about this affair that began seven months ago, when TikTokByteDance and other groups had raised a constitutional objection against the “anti-TikTok” law. According to the Chinese company’s legal team, forcing a change of ownership by threatening to block an app used by more than half the American population would be a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects free speech for all citizens Americans.
TikTok: “The Supreme Court will decide”
TikTok’s response arrived on Saturday and suggests that the legal team plans to bring the matter directly to the court Supreme Court of the United States, the highest judicial body in the country. This is the statement circulated in the evening: “The Supreme Court has a long history of protecting the right to free expression in the United States, and we trust that it will act with the same determination on this important constitutional issue. Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was designed and supported based on inaccurate information, misleading and speculative, constituting a true form of censorship against the American people. If not stopped, this ban risks drowning out the voices of more than 170 million Americans in the United States and around the world. from 19 January 2025″. The battle is therefore still far from over. While it will drag on the conflict between the US government and China, it will also have unpredictable consequences for freedom of speech in the digital world.
Many observers have noted that the deadline for the company’s obligation to sell is the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, which is no coincidence. The 47th president of the United States, during the election campaign, promised to “save TikTok”: certainly not out of sympathy towards the PCC but because this rule would guarantee the federal government the possibility of forcing changes in ownership of unwelcome platforms. As relations between the US and China turn stormy, Trump may find himself in the unwelcome situation of having to defend a law he has always believed to be wrong. In limbo, in addition to the users, also the thousands of content creator who look in horror at the possibility of the platform that allows them to live being banned.
At the moment the team dealing with the transition has not yet expressed its opinion on the issue but, given the risk of erasing their favorite platform from the phones of millions of teenagers, it is likely that this will be one of the issues that the new president will have to address as early as January 20th.