TikTok turns to the Supreme Court in a Hail Mary to avoid getting banned in a month
Emergency, paging Dr. Beat… TikTok’s making a last-ditch effort to continue feeding vertical-dance videos and #GRWM storytimes to Americans. This week, it made an emergency request asking the US Supreme Court to temporarily halt a law which would force its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or be banned in the US. A group of US users filed a similar petition. ICYMI: if ByteDance doesn’t sell its controlling stake in TikTok by January 19, the app — which is used by 170M Americans — is set to be blocked from US devices.
A rock and a barred place: ByteDance has said it won’t sell TikTok, and China’s unlikely to approve exporting the app’s algorithm. If ByteDance doesn’t divest, then app stores including Apple’s and Google’s could face huge fines if they keep offering TikTok.
A fighting chance? POTUS-elect Trump backpedaled on his 2020 attempt to block TikTok nationwide, and on the campaign trail said he’d try to save the app.
Tough timing: The ban-or-divest deadline is one day before Trump’s inauguration, and President Biden hasn’t suggested any plans to extend it (his admin signed the bill into law).
For You Rage… TikTok was expected to bring the case up to SCOTUS after a lower court ruled this month that the Tik-ban law could stand (the lower court rejected TikTok’s argument that the ban violates free speech). There’s a heated debate over whether scrolling the Tok is a constitutional right: TikTok has argued the ban violates the First Amendment, while the US gov’t insists that the app’s Chinese ownership is a national-security risk.
“Tikstocks” have much to lose… because TikTok is an economy unto itself, from creators to companies. Retailers and other corporations that’ve grown reliant on TikTok for marketing could take a hit (see: some of the biggest Tikstocks). Record labels have also grown increasingly reliant on TikTok to make their songs go viral.