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TikTok says it plans to shut down the social media site in the U.S. by Jan. 19 unless the Supreme Court intervenes to stop the ban.
The law is set to take effect in a few days, nine months after it swiftly passed Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Biden. It requires the widely popular app to cut ties with its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or lose access to app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S. The law also allows the president to grant a 90-day delay in its implementation if a sale is in progress.
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The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Friday, Jan. 10. The justices also have before them a plea from President-elect Donald Trump, who has dropped his earlier support for a ban, to give him and his new administration time to reach a “political resolution” and avoid deciding the case.
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At this time, it is unclear if the court will take the Republican president-elect’s views into account. TikTok and China-based ByteDance argue the law is a dramatic violation of the Constitution’s free speech guarantee
The Biden administration is defending the law that President Joe Biden signed in April after it was approved by wide bipartisan majorities in Congress stating that “no one can seriously dispute that (China’s) control of TikTok through ByteDance represents a grave threat to national security.”
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In December, a panel of three appellate judges unanimously upheld the law and rejected the First Amendment speech claims. If the law takes effect, Trump’s Justice Department will be charged with enforcing it.
Additionally. lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the new administration could seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences. A shutdown of just a month would cause TikTok to lose about one-third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue, they added.
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