TikTok asks court to pause law that could shut down app next month

TikTok asked a federal appeals court on Monday to temporarily halt a law that could close down the app in the United States next month so the Supreme Court can review the matter.

The company wrote in a petition for injunctive relief that the high court should intervene before Jan. 19, the deadline set by the recent federal law for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular video-sharing platform or face a nationwide prohibition.

TikTok argued that halting the law would give the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump the chance to step in. Trump, who is set to take office Jan. 20, has promised to “save” the app from a U.S. ban after earlier advocating for one. TikTok argued that the Trump administration “could moot both the impending harms and the need for Supreme Court review.”

The company said the Supreme Court should have an opportunity to wade into the matter given it is an “exceptionally important case” that could force a shutdown of “one of the Nation’s most popular speech platforms,” which boasts more than 170 million U.S. users.

In a separate filing Monday morning, Justice Department attorneys asked the court to quickly reject TikTok’s request so as to “maximize the time available” for the Supreme Court to decide whether to review the case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Justice Department on Friday in upholding the ban-or-sale law, which was signed into law this year amid concerns from U.S. officials on both sides of the aisle that China could use the app to harvest data from Americans or influence public opinion in the United States. TikTok is fighting to overturn the law, which it argues would infringe on the free speech rights of its millions of users and its owners.

The Supreme Court could agree to take the case and pause the Jan. 19 sale-or-ban deadline, giving the app at least a temporary reprieve before justices decide whether to uphold the law. But Matt Schettenhelm, a legal analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, said Friday in a note to investors that he believed TikTok had only a slim chance of getting the law overturned.

The unanimous D.C. Circuit opinion was written by Douglas Ginsburg and joined by Neomi Rao, two judges with whom the conservative-leaning Supreme Court tends to agree, Schettenhelm said.

“This is a sweeping loss for TikTok that will be difficult to undo,” he said.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Ginsburg wrote in the panel’s decision last week. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation.”

In its motion Monday, TikTok cited Trump’s vows to “save TikTok” and a Washington Post report in which his allies said they expected him to try to halt the law. The possibility that the Supreme Court would review the law’s constitutionality, only for a “new administration to halt its enforcement mere days or weeks later,” would be a “burdensome spectacle,” the motion said. TikTok said that if there was even a one-month shutdown, a third of its daily U.S. users might not return.

Trump representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has said it has no intention of selling the company, but some potential buyers have nevertheless voiced their interest. Frank McCourt, the billionaire former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he and a group of allied investors were “working very, very hard to be in a position” to buy TikTok’s U.S. business for what he expected would be tens of billions of dollars.

“President Trump is a dealmaker. We know that. I’m a dealmaker. Okay? I’ve been doing business deals my entire life,” he said. “Let’s make a deal where everybody wins.”

ByteDance officials have said selling off the U.S. app would be extraordinarily challenging for several reasons, including its reliance on a global software infrastructure and user base, as well as China’s long-standing pledge to block the sale of the app’s signature video-recommendation algorithm.