TikTok Loses Bid To Overturn US Divestiture Law

A US appeals court has rejected TikTok’s effort to overturn a law that would force it to divest its business in the country or face a ban by mid-January.

Lawyers for the company, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, had argued in a hearing in September that the law went against the US constitution’s right to free speech and would have a “staggering” impact on the expression of its 170 million US users.

But the court said the law was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary”.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court said in an opinion written by Douglas Ginsburg.

‘Foreign adversary’

“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.”

The US government argues that the vast amounts of data on Americans that TikTok collects could be made available to the Chinese government.

The government is also concerned that TikTok’s algorithm, which affects what users see, could be manipulated by Chinese authorities to shape content on the platform.

ByteDance says the concerns are without foundation.

The company says it would not be legally or technically possible to divest TikTok’s US business, meaning the US law amounts to an outright ban.

TikTok and ByteDance, which were both plaintiffs to the lawsuit brought in May, are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.

New administration

In another complicating factor, former president Donald Trump, who earlier attempted to ban TikTok in 2020, said during his re-election campaign that he would not allow the law to take effect after he returns to office in January.

Trump joined the platform during his campaign and said banning it would unfairly benefit Facebook.