TikTok has filed for an emergency reprieve with the U.S. Supreme Court to buy more time before a nationwide ban on the social media app is set to go into effect next month.
“This Court should grant an injunction pending further review,” TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, said in Monday’s filing for a temporary injunction. A ban, they said, would “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.”
The fate of TikTok in the U.S. has been up in the air since 2020, when then-President Trump moved to shut down the short-form video app because of national security concerns.
That set off four years of back-and-forth between TikTok and the U.S. government. In April, President Biden signed a law that required ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese entity; TikTok responded by suing the U.S. government in May.
The company this month lost a major court battle in its efforts to remain active in the U.S., setting up a potential showdown in the Supreme Court.
As things stand now, TikTok is scheduled to be banned in the U.S. on Jan. 19 if the tech company does not divest before then.
The move would result in “a massive and unprecedented censorship,” TikTok said. “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.”
More than 170 million Americans use the video app, on which people share dance routines, news stories, recipes and funny videos.
“The Supreme Court has an established record of upholding Americans’ right to free speech,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. “Today, TikTok is asking the Court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the 1st Amendment.”
Although he pushed for a ban during his first term, Trump reversed course while campaigning this year.
“For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” he said in a video posted on Truth Social in September. “The other side’s closing it up.”
