TikTok is one step closer to disappearing in the United States after a panel of federal judges Friday unanimously upheld a new law that could lead to the banning of the popular Chinese-owned video app by mid-January.
The three judges, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law. The decision could be a death blow for the app in one of its biggest markets. More than 170 million Americans use TikTok to entertain and inform themselves, turning it into a cultural phenomenon. The looming loss of the app in the United States had spurred concern from free speech advocates and from the creators whose income depends on TikTok.
The decision also raises new questions for President-elect Donald Trump, who has repeatedly signaled his support for the app but who doesn’t have a clear path for rescuing it under the new law, which is scheduled to go into effect the day before his inauguration.
The law, signed in April, requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19 or face a ban in the United States. TikTok, which has raised national security concerns among politicians since 2020 because of its ties to China, has said a sale is impossible, in part because it would be blocked by the Chinese government. The company argued that the law unfairly singled out TikTok and that a ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights of American users.
The judges disagreed with TikTok’s argument. They said the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary” and didn’t run afoul of the First Amendment. “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,” the judges wrote Friday.
American lawmakers and intelligence officials have said TikTok poses a national security threat under ByteDance. They say the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to use the app to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred. They have also noted that apps like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China and that the country does not allow TikTok there.
TikTok said it would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which it expected to rule differently.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” Michael Hughes, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement. He called the ban “outright censorship of the American people.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ruling “an important step in blocking the Chinese government from weaponizing TikTok.”
Exactly what happens next for the app is unclear, as there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will take up the case.
Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, is among the experts who expect the Supreme Court will take up the case and extend TikTok’s future in the United States.
“The Supreme Court, not wanting to see this app go dark on Jan. 19, will freeze the law, and then this gets handed over to the Trump administration and a Trump Department of Justice to figure out what they want to do,” he said.
If the company doesn’t sell, its short-term hope for continuing in the United States will be a court-ordered injunction that would pause the law from taking effect.
Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for financial services firm TD Cowen, said in a recent note that he expected the Supreme Court to take up the appeal and rule by June.
Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan on Friday acknowledged the popularity of the app and noted that without a sale, many Americans could “lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income.”
But, he added: “Congress judged it necessary to assume that risk given the grave national-security threats it perceived. And because the record reflects that Congress’ decision was considered, consistent with long-standing regulatory practice, and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, we are not in a position to set it aside.”
It is not clear how Trump could save the app, based on the law’s timeline and language. A spokesperson for his team said in November that “he will deliver” on a plan to rescue the app but provided few details about how he would do so.
It would take an act of Congress to repeal the law. Some experts have speculated that Trump could ask his new attorney general to refrain from enforcing it. But that would put technology companies like Apple and Google in a tricky spot. The law penalizes companies for distributing or updating TikTok on their app stores, so tech giants would have to trust in the Trump administration’s potentially mercurial promises of nonenforcement and prepare for that to change under a different president.
The law also gives the president the authority to decide whether a sale or a similar transaction successfully removes TikTok from “foreign adversary” control. Some experts speculated that ByteDance could make some structural changes to appease those requirements. If Trump blessed them, he could allow the app to continue operating in the United States.
And despite Trump’s promises, his commitment to TikTok’s future is uncertain given his hawkish stance on China. In 2020, he sought to block TikTok in the United States and force its sale to a group of American companies, citing similar national security concerns to those raised this year by Congress.
Congress passed the law after being swayed by several closed-door intelligence briefings that outlined the threats posed by TikTok’s ownership. There is a chance that Trump changes his mind about the app if he is briefed on that same information once in office, said Sarah Kreps, a professor at the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
“It’s clear that the legislators thought there was enough evidence supporting a danger, and there was a willingness to set free speech concerns aside in favor of national security,” she said.
Overall, she said that it remained to be seen which version of Trump would take up the TikTok question.
“Is it going to be Trump the dealmaker or Trump the China hawk?” she said. “This is so complicated.”
Free speech advocates quickly condemned the decision and predicted that the Supreme Court would rule differently. The American Civil Liberties Union called it “a major blow to freedom of expression online” with dangerous implications for other platforms under foreign ownership. Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the ruling was “deeply misguided” and “gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans’ access to information, ideas, and media from abroad.”
But Gallant said in a note Friday that the unanimous ruling from the three judges suggested that the Supreme Court would also uphold the decision. He noted that the D.C. court judges were made up of two conservatives and one liberal, similar to the Supreme Court’s makeup.
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