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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled to uphold the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Applications Act, which requires the social media video app TikTok to divest from Chinese ownership. According to the bill signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this year, TikTok must be free of Chinese control by January 19, 2025; otherwise, it faces a ban in the United States.

Following the divestment legislation’s enactment, TikTok sued the Biden-Harris government, arguing the statute infringed on the company’s constitutional rights, including the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. However, the federal appellate court found that the federal government’s national security prerogative takes precedence in its ruling.

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“We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users. Unless TikTok executes a qualified divestiture by January 19, 2025—or the President grants a 90-day extension based upon progress towards a qualified divestiture, §2(a)(3)—its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time. Consequently, TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication,” the court writes in its opinion.

“That burden is attributable to the PRC’s hybrid commercial threat to U.S. national security, not to the U.S. government, which engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in an effort to find an alternative solution,” it continues.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. 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,” the appeals court concludes, denying TikTok’s request for relief from the law.

Both the first Trump White House and the Biden government have sought to force TikTok’s divestiture from China, citing the social app’s threat to national security due to numerous instances of its data being shared with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). India, another nation that views China as a regional adversary and threat, has already banned the app, with domestic alternatives seeing exponential growth in popularity.

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