TiKTok loses appeal against US ban law

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, has lost its appeal against a law seeking to ban its app.

Per Associated Press, a US federal appeals court panel on Friday (December 6) decided unanimously that it would uphold a law that sees the ban of TikTok in the country – as soon as next month.

The law requires TikTok to be sold off by, and break ties with, the China-based ByteDance – or be banned by mid-January. Legal representatives of the social media app argued that the ban infringes upon the country’s First Amendment.

However, this was rebuffed by the court: “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, per a written statement by Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

“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.”

TikTok is set to appeal the ban to the Supreme Court at an undisclosed future date, with its spokesperson Michael Hughes saying in a statement: “The TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people”.

The sell-or-ban measure was issued into law by US President Joe Biden earlier this year (April 24), following a long-running dispute over claims that the company’s ownership structure could allow the Chinese government to gain access to the data of its millions of American users.

To date, over 30 American states, Canada, and the European Union have separately banned the app from use on government-owned devices over concerns it could be a security risk. India banned the app nationwide in January 2021, while Taiwan and Afghanistan did the same in 2022.

The consequence of TikTok’s US bans may have a sizeable impact on the music industry – a recent report by the platform claimed that a majority of US and UK chart-topping singles in 2024 were associated with a TikTok trend this year.

In May, TikTok also established a new licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, after the label initially withdrew its artists’ music from the platform as a result of both parties’ inability to work out a new deal.

In September, TikTok shut its streaming service, TikTok Music, after just over a year of operations.