Posted in: streaming, TV | Tagged: bytedance, TikTok

TikTok Eyes Supreme Court for Emergency Injunction Blocking U.S. Ban

TikTok applied to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the law banning the service if ByteDance doesn't divest from the company by January 19th.

Amid reports that incoming POTUS Donald Trump will be meeting with the folks in charge of the video social media service, TikTok is asking the Supreme Court to drop a temporary injunction on a bill that requires owner ByteDance to divest from the popular social media service by January 19, 2025, or face TikTok being banned in the U.S. The move comes ten days after U.S. Federal Appeals Court Judges Sri Srinivasan, Neomi Rao, and Douglas Ginsburg ruled that the law was not a violation of the company's free speech and was crafted "to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary and to limit that adversary's ability to gather data on people in the United States."

"The Supreme Court has an established record of upholding Americans' right to free speech. Today, we are asking the Court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the First Amendment," TikTok wrote in a statement released shortly after the news that an application for an emergency injunction had been filed, with ByteDance looking the implementation of the law to be blocked until the high court has had time to assess the company's First Amendment claim. "The TikTok ban results in a massive and unprecedented censorship of over 170 million Americans on January 19, 2025. Estimates show that small businesses on TikTok would lose more than $1 billion in revenue, and creators would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings in just one month unless the ban is halted."

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