TikTok Asks For Emergency Pause On US Divestiture Law

TikTok and parent company ByteDance have asked for an emergency injunction to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban the app in the United States to give the Supreme Court more time to review the case.

The companies said in a court filing on Monday that they also wanted to give incoming president Donald Trump an opportunity to decide whether he wants to enforce the law.

The law, a bipartisan effort signed into law in the spring, is set to take effect on 19 January, a day before Trump’s inauguration.

TikTok and ByteDance asked an appeals court to throw out the law on the grounds that it impedes freedom of speech, but the case was rejected on Friday.

‘Irreparable injury’

TikTok said US small businesses and social media creators would lose $1.3 billion (£1bn) in revenue in a single month if the app were shut down, even temporarily.

Nearly two million creators in the US would lose $300m in earnings, while TikTok itself would lose 29 percent of its targeted global advertising revenue for 2025 in one month, TikTok said.e

As of November 2024, more than 7 million US accounts use TikTok to do business, with 39 percent of those saying access to TikTok is critical to their business’ existence, the company said, citing data prepared for the company by Oxford Economics.

Even a temporary ban would be “inflicting irreparable injury by silencing Petitioners and the 170 million Americans who use the platform each month”, TikTok and ByteDance said in their filing.

The companies plan to ask the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling upholding the law that was handed down on Friday by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

‘Exceptionally important’

“The Supreme Court should have an opportunity, as the only court with appellate jurisdiction over this action, to decide whether to review this exceptionally important case,” the companies said in their filing.

They asked for an injunction that would suspend the law’s enforcement until the Supreme Court issued a decision on whether or not it would hear the appeal.

The appeals court on Friday unanimously rejected TikTok’s case, saying the law was the result of “extensive, bipartisan action” by lawmakers.

The Justice Department in a Monday filing said the court should reject the request for an injunction as the underlying questions of fact and law had already been “definitively rejected”.

“The Court is familiar with the relevant facts and law and has definitively rejected petitioners’ constitutional claims in a thorough decision that recognizes the critical national-security interests underlying the Act,” the Department said in its filing.

The law seeks to force TikTok’s divestiture from its Chinese owner or face a ban, over national security concerns over the app’s alleged links to the Chinese government, which the company denies.