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A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that TikTok must be sold or it will be banned in the United States. Users of the popular social media video app are not happy and are expressing their frustration online.
According to the Associated Press, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to strike down a law passed which was passed earlier this year. The law requires TikTok to be sold by its China-based parent company ByteDance by mid-January because it supposedly poses a national security risk to Americans.
The legislation, called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed overwhelmingly by a 352-65 vote in the House of Representatives. The following month, President Joe Biden would sign a bill to ban TikTok in America, despite his re-election campaign continuing to use the social media app.
On Friday, in the court’s opinion (which can be read here), Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
TikTok and ByteDance are expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. They have repeatedly denied the app is being used by Chinese authorities as a tool to spy on or manipulate Americans.
Donald Trump tried to remove TikTok from app stores in 2020 by signed an executive order giving the company an ultimatum to either be sold to a “very American” company or “be out of business” in the U.S., now says he is against the ban.
He’s not the only one. Numerous TikTok users are venting their anger over the decision on social media.
“Tuition-free college? No. Universal healthcare? No. Banning TikTok? Yes,” one person commented on X (Twitter). “The priorities of our government are backwards.”
“We got mass sh00tings happening almost every day, health care is a–, women, lgbtq, and poc are constantly being attacked and unprotected by the law… but tiktok is where we draw the line?” someone else asked.
“I have so many edits to download oh my God,” read another comment.
“Pry it out of my cold dead hands,” another TikTok user wrote.