In the United States, a federal appeals court has stood firm in the face of TikTok’s attempts to avoid a blanket ban across the nation. The court upheld a law that has been tossed to and fro for years, with US legislators seeking to force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, into a divestiture in the United States.
Despite the application being used by more than 150 million Americans, lawmakers in the US have been trying to ban it for several years.
Will TikTok Be Banned in the US?
This all stems from the United States’ insistence that ByteDance and TikTok are linked to the Chinese state, which the tech titan has actively denied on several occasions.
On the decision, Judge Douglas Ginsburg said:
TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication. That burden is attributable to China’s hybrid commercial threat to US national security, not to the US government, which engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in an effort to find an alternative solution.
It was stated by the appeals court that the law being lobbied in an attempt to ban the app “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents. It was carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC.”
TikTok has some US forces in its pocket, though. In a statement, the deputy director of ACLU’s National Security, Patrick Toomey, said:
Banning TikTok blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use this app to express themselves and communicate with people around the world.
Presently, ByteDance has until January 19 to sell or divest TikTok’s assets in the United States – or face a nationwide ban. There’s a chance that President Biden could grant an extension to that deadline, and ByteDance has moved to challenge the decision of the appeals court in the Supreme Court, but it’s all still up in the air.
In the run-up to his successful election campaign, Donald Trump said he’d block the ban – four years after trying to actively shut the application down in the United States. However, if no extension lands and the Supreme Court refuses to help, Donald Trump won’t be in office before the deadline arrives, which renders his support moot.
Would you suffer if TikTok was banned in the United States? Let us know on the GPlayr forum.
For more GPlayr coverage, check out the news that Hazelight Studios has a new game coming