A federal court on Friday denied TikTok’s request to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban in the United States as of Jan. 19, a decision that puts the fate of the app in the Supreme Court’s hands.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a filing late on Friday that an injunction was “unwarranted,” and that it had expedited its decision so that TikTok and its users could seek an emergency freeze from the Supreme Court.
A week ago, three judges in the same court unanimously denied petitions from the company and its users to overturn the law. TikTok then asked the court on Monday to temporarily block the law until the Supreme Court decided on TikTok’s planned appeal of that decision, and sought a decision by Dec. 16.
The court said on Friday that TikTok and its users “have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court.”
It isn’t clear whether the Supreme Court will agree to temporarily freeze the law and hear the case, though experts say that is likely.
Michael Hughes, a spokesman for TikTok, said, “As we have previously stated, we plan on taking this case to the Supreme Court, which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech.” He said that American users’ voices would be “silenced” if the law were not stopped.
The decision represents another setback for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and is facing new peril under the law, which was passed citing national security concerns. TikTok, which boasts 170 million users in the United States, has said that a sale is impossible in part because of restrictions from the Chinese government, and that a subsequent ban would violate the First Amendment rights of users.
TikTok has been hoping that a temporary freeze of the law might also give President-elect Donald J. Trump more time to try to rescue the app, as he has pledged to do on the campaign trail. The law is scheduled to go into effect a day before his inauguration.
In a recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump seemed to scale back some of his previous comments about saving TikTok. When asked about his plans, he said that he would “try and make it so that other companies don’t become an even bigger monopoly,” and noted that the law said that the government has “the right to ban it if you can prove that Chinese companies own it.”
A House committee sent letters to the chief executives of Apple and Google on Friday, warning them to comply with the law in the absence of a sale. The law requires app store operators like Apple and Google to stop distributing and updating the TikTok app. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on its plans to comply with the law. Google declined to comment.
In a separate letter, the committee urged TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, to pursue a sale.
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