TikTok ban

The Supreme Court Building. Photo Credit: Joe Ravi

As its U.S. fate hangs in the balance – and moments following a meeting between its CEO and President-elect Trump – TikTok is now petitioning the Supreme Court for an emergency injunction pending review.

ByteDance-owned TikTok made the emergency injunction push official yesterday, after an appellate panel upheld the relevant law closer to December’s beginning. As most are well aware (and as we’ve covered in detail), that law will result in TikTok’s stateside shutdown on January 19th unless the platform sells or the president extends the deadline by 90 days.

On the former front, TikTok and its parent have long criticized the prospect of selling as (among other things) unworkable from an operational perspective. With just 33 days until the cutoff, the position, on top of free-speech arguments and more, certainly hasn’t changed.

This past Friday, the same appellate court that ruled against TikTok rejected the app’s attempt to pause the deadline pending Supreme Court review. The development then set the stage for TikTok to try and bring the matter before the nation’s highest court.

In its petition for an emergency injunction and review from the Supreme Court, TikTok off the bat criticized the appropriate measure as “a massive and unprecedented speech restriction.”

Furthermore, allowing TikTok to go dark in the States – Congress has already notified Google and Apple to begin preparing for the removal from their app stores – would drive “substantial and unrecoverable monetary and competitive harms,” per the petition.

The “countless small businesses” on TikTok would likewise suffer monetary harms, the platform maintained in the 50-page document, exploring as well the perceived unconstitutional nature of the law and a variety of different arguments.

Without diving too far into those multifaceted arguments, it’s worth noting that the platform further stressed the logistically “complex task” of shutting down solely in the States. In the absence of an injunction, TikTok would need “a period of lead time” to swing the shutdown – hence a request that the Supreme Court rule on the petition by January 6th.

In other words, we should know the Supreme Court’s position (and have additional context about TikTok’s U.S. future) sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, as mentioned, TikTok is also appealing directly to President-elect Trump, who recently acknowledged having a “warm spot” for the app. Even so, and despite a meeting yesterday between the president-elect and CEO Shou Zi Chew, the divest-or-ban deadline will arrive one day before Trump’s inauguration.

Stated differently, however the incoming administration handles the TikTok situation, the app will cease operating in the U.S. on January 19th without an injunction or the above-highlighted extension.

Consequently, it’d be an understatement to describe the stakes as high for TikTok, which continues to face regulatory scrutiny in different nations to boot.