A federal appeals court denied TikTok’s request to overturn an April law requiring the social media platform to sever ties with its China-based parent company or face a ban in the United States.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Friday TikTok must divest from CCP-controlled ByteDance by Jan. 19 or the popular social media app will lose access to app stores and web-hosting services in the United States.
"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States," Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. "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."
Lawmakers and national security officials have long warned about TikTok's ties to China, saying the app is a national security threat and subjects the data from its roughly 170 million American users to Chinese surveillance.
Chinese national security laws require organizations, like TikTok, to cooperate with intelligence gathering.
TikTok and ByteDance, however, challenged the legislation against it in May, calling the law "an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power" based on "speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation" that would suppress the speech of millions of Americans.
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