This week, with the clock ticking down before a U.S. law forces its sale, TikTok filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent that law from going into effect.

Without Supreme Court intervention, TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance must either sell the platform off or shut it down in the U.S. by Jan. 19 — President Joe Biden’s last full day in office. Biden does have the authority to grant an extension if ByteDance demonstrates a good faith effort to find a buyer, but to date that has not happened.

In a statement to The Bee, TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said that the Supreme Court “has an established record of upholding Americans’ right to free speech,” and that the company is asking the court to “apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the First Amendment.”

Hughes called the federal law, passed earlier in 2024, “a massive and unprecedented censorship of over 170 million Americans.”

“Estimates show that small businesses on TikTok would lose more than $1 billion in revenue and creators would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings in just one month unless the ban is halted,” Hughes said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit earlier this month rejected the request from TikTok and several content creators to stay the ban, citing the government’s argument that the Chinese-owned video-sharing social media platform constitutes a national security risk.

Jacob Huebert, president of the libertarian-leaning Liberty Justice Center, which represents one of the plaintiffs, said that if the ban takes effect, it will “shut down the speech of millions of Americans — including our clients’ speech on important political ideas and events.”

“Ultimately, the Court must make clear that the government cannot escape the First Amendment’s restrictions by simply saying the words ‘national security,” Huebert said.

Federal lawmakers cited national security concerns, and also concerns over the safety of American users’ data, as rationale for the ban — a rationale that the D.C. Circuit Court agreed with.

On Tuesday, representatives from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Free Press — who co-signed a brief opposing the ban — held a press conference over Zoom where they discussed the situation.

Yanni Chen, policy counsel for Free Press, a nonprofit which advocates for “equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms” according to its website, said that “there has been no public evidence that China’s government has manipulated TikTok content” as federal lawmakers have claimed.

She said that for at least some of those federal lawmakers, it appeared that the decision to vote for the ban was “rooted in xenophobia and sinophobia,” the latter being a fear of Chinese people and culture.

George Wang, staff attorney for the Knight First Amendment Institute, said that the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling didn’t take seriously the fact that this ban is a form of censorship.

“We usually look to courts to stand up to the government when it infringes on the constitutional rights of millions of Americans,” he said, adding that that didn’t happen this time.

Chen laid out a possible timeline that going forward.

The Supreme Court will have to make a few decisions.

First, it must decide whether to take it up. Then, it must decide whether to grant TikTok’s request for an injunction against the law, preventing it from going into effect until the matter is fully litigated.

Chen said that if the Supreme Court takes up the case, it will probably also grant an injunction.

If it does not consider the case that means the D.C. Circuit opinion stands and the ban will go into effect unless TikTok finds a buyer or Biden acts.

But who can afford to buy TikTok?

Nora Benevidez, senior counsel for the Free Press, warned of a situation akin to what happened with X, formerly Twitter, where conservative billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform, systematically eliminated accountability safeguards, brought back several racist accounts that had previously been banned, and promoted his own content to users whether they followed him or not including election denialist and far right rhetoric.

“That’s just one of the ways that an existing platform can be completely reshaped,” she said.

Wang agreed, saying “the owner of a social media platform really matters to the overall speech ecosystem on that platform.”

Very few people or companies have the financial wherewithal to buy TikTok, and the ones that do likely would have an agenda for doing so, he said.

Wang added that politics appeared to play at least some role in the TikTok ban passing in Congress (which it did on a bipartisan vote).

“Some lawmakers were very clear that the band was at least partially motivated by what content was popular on TikTok,” he said. “... Banning social media, again, that’s a tactic of repressive regimes, not democracies.”

Benevidez added that the law is a warning for encroaching autocracy in the United States.

“When we begin as a government picking and choosing which (platforms) are available to communities, that really edges toward authoritarian practices,” she said.

Supporters of the ban cite the danger posed by the People’s Republic of China, an adversary to the U.S., should it access American users’ data. To date, no evidence has been publicly provided to demonstrate that is happening.

Wang added “It’s actually hard to see what the stopping point is,” saying that if the government can ban TikTok then it can ban other forms of media as well.

“It’s really hard to see where that logic stops,” he said.

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