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TikTok has lost a critical legal battle after a US federal appeals court upheld a law requiring its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the platform or face a nationwide ban starting in January 2025.

Let’s bring you up to speed: Back in April 2024, the US government intensified its scrutiny of TikTok due to national security concerns over its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers feared that the Chinese government could access American user data or manipulate content on the platform. In response, Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in a 360-58 vote. President Biden ultimately signed the legislation into law on April 24, 2024, mandating that ByteDance divest its ownership of TikTok by January 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban. Following this, TikTok filed various lawsuits attempting to stop the ban.

What’s going on now: In a ruling, a US federal appeals court rejected TikTok’s argument that the law mandating its forced divestiture or face a ban violates the First Amendment rights of its American users. Lawyers for TikTok argued that the legislation unfairly singles out the platform, effectively silencing the free speech of 170 million US users based on what they allude to as “speculative” national security concerns. The company also argued that forcing a sale was unconstitutional, describing it as an extraordinary overreach of government power without substantive evidence of imminent harm.

In their verdict, Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg said, “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. We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny. We therefore deny the petitions.”

The court, however, dismissed these claims, emphasizing that the law targets China’s potential misuse of TikTok for data collection and covert content manipulation rather than censoring speech.

TikTok reacts: In a statement, TikTok vowed to appeal the decision. They added, “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue. Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19, 2025.”