TikTok is likely to face a ban in the US after losing its appeal.
The US has denied TikTok’s attempt to overturn a regulation that would have banned it from marketing or use in the US starting in early 2025.
Because the law had a “staggering” impact on the free expression of its 170 million US users, the social media corporation anticipated a federal appeals court would agree with its claim that the statute was unconstitutional.
However, the court claimed that the law “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents” and affirmed it.
TikTok claims that it will now take its battle all the way to the US Supreme Court, which is the nation’s highest court.
The US wants to sell or ban the app due to what it claims are TikTok’s owners’ ties to the Chinese government—links that TikTok and parent firm Bytedance have consistently denied.
The court recognized that the legislation 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 (People’s Republic of China).”
However, TikTok stated that its legal battle was far from over.
“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,” a spokeswoman for TikTok said in a statement.
“Inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information” was the basis for the law, they added, and a ban would muzzle Americans.
The app might potentially have a chance to survive if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in 2024.
He declared in the lead-up to the November elections that he would not permit the TikTok ban to go into effect, despite his first term in 2020 having seen a failed attempt to do so.
Trump will take office on January 20, the day after the law requires the marketing or prohibition of TikTok.
But whether he will keep his pre-election promise is still up in the air.
“Swimming upstream to give TikTok a reprieve” is what Cornell University professor James Grimmelmann predicted the president-elect would be doing.
“The anti-China sentiment in the US Congress is very strong, so there are now substantial constituencies in both parties that want TikTok to be restricted from the US market,” he stated to BBC News.
Both TikTok users and the app’s competitors have been closely following the court case.
TikTok creator and small business champion Tiffany Cianci told BBC News that she was “not shocked” by Friday’s decision, but she also stated that she would not be moving her TikTok presence or material to Instagram or other competitors.
“I’m not going to do what they want and take my content to their platforms where it’s not as successful where it’s more likely to be censored, where I am more likely to have less control over my audience,” she stated.
However, other platforms are preparing for the social media world that will exist after TikTok.
Amid concerns over the app’s survival in the US, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, has made adjustments that users have compared to TikTok in an effort to create competitors for the app’s short form videos within its own apps.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at eMarketer, predicts “major upheaval” should a TikTok appeal fail at the Supreme Court and a ban take effect.
She claimed that this would be “benefiting Meta, YouTube, and Snap while hurting content creators and small businesses that rely on the app to make a living.”
However, Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Epistrophy Capital Research, stated that it will be difficult to replicate TikTok. Deep learning models power TikTok’s recommendation engine, according to Johnson.
“Enabling such complex AI and big data processing at TikTok’s immense scale requires a colossal and expensive technical infrastructure,” Johnson stated.
He cited Elon Musk’s changes to the algorithms at his social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, as a warning, pointing out that China’s data laws and TikTok’s hyper-targeting present serious hazards.
According to Johnson, Musk’s political posts garnered more views than all U.S. political campaign advertisements on X’s disclosure dataset during the lead-up to the U.S. election.
“We have very real and very recent experience in America with a social media network tweaking its algorithms to favor certain voices,” he stated.
