A federal appeals court in the United States on Friday upheld a law requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest its popular short video app TikTok in the United States by early next year or face a ban.
The ruling now increases the possibility of an unprecedented ban in just six weeks on a social media app used by 170 million Americans.
The ruling is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
Free speech advocates immediately criticized the decision. The American Civil Liberties Union was quoted by Reuters to have said the court’s ruling sets a “flawed and dangerous precedent.”
“Banning TikTok blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use this app to express themselves and communicate with people around the world,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
But the appeals court said the law “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents. It was carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”
