Court throws out TikTok’s injunction against US ban

An Appeals Court in the District of Columbia has thrown out ByteDance-owned TikTok’s emergency injunction to overturn an enacted “Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications” law.

The move is headed towards outlawing the well-known social media platform in the United States.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in the order released Monday that it was “unwarranted” to provide a temporary injunction to halt TikTok’s U.S. ban.

It believed that doing so would completely suspend a statute that Congress had purposefully passed and the court had affirmed as lawful, rather than only postpone the implementation of a court decision.

“The petitioners have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court,” the order stated.

”TikTok’s motion for an injunction was based on its argument that the prohibition infringes upon the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech,” the court added.

Recall that in May, TikTok and ByteDance filed a complaint and lawsuit against the US government, which was forwarded to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, initiating their legal battle.

In the lawsuit, TikTok and ByteDance say the law banning its operations in the US “would allow the government to decide that a company may no longer own and publish the innovative and unique speech platform it created. If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down.”

”The law will “silence the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere,” TikTok and ByteDance alleged in a statement.

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