The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled on Friday in favor of the federal government’s ability to ban TikTok in the United States due to national security concerns sparked by China’s influence over the popular social media platform.
According to CNN, TikTok sued the federal government in May after President Joe Biden signed the law that was passed by Congress to force ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell the social media company to an American company or face a TikTok ban in the United States. Despite the company arguing that the ban would infringe against the First Amendment, a three-judge panel ruled that the TikTok ban could move forward in the United States.
On Friday, the court ruled that Congress was able to show that the law requiring ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a potential ban in the United States was “essential to protect our national security.”
“People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” the judges wrote. “What the Act targets is the PRC’s ability to manipulate the content covertly. Understood in that way, the Government’s justification is wholly consonant with the First Amendment.”
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In Friday’s ruling, Judge Douglas Ginsburg explained, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States. For these reasons the petitions are denied.”
The court ruled that unless the social media company completes a “qualified divestiture” by January 19 or the president approves a 90-day extension, the platform will “effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time.”
Following Friday’s ruling, TikTok indicated that it plans to appeal the court’s decision in a statement on its website.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”
TikTok claimed that unless the potential ban on TikTok is stopped, the ban will “silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world” in January.