By Andrew Chung and David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -TikTok made a last-ditch effort on Monday to continue operating in the United States, asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block a law intended to force ByteDance, its China-based parent company, to divest the short-video app by Jan. 19 or face a ban.
TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency request to the justices for an injunction to halt the looming ban on the social media app used by about 170 million Americans while they appeal a lower court's ruling that upheld the law. A group of U.S. users of the app filed a similar request on Monday as well.
Congress passed the law in April. The Justice Department has said that as a Chinese company, TikTok poses "a national-security threat of immense depth and scale" because of its access to vast amounts of data on American users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate content that Americans view on the app.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington on Dec. 6 rejected TikTok's arguments that the law violates free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
In their filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok and ByteDance said that "if Americans, duly informed of the alleged risks of 'covert' content manipulation, choose to continue viewing content on TikTok with their eyes wide open, the First Amendment entrusts them with making that choice, free from the government's censorship."
"And if the D.C. Circuit's contrary holding stands, then Congress will have free rein to ban any American from speaking simply by identifying some risk that the speech is influenced by a foreign entity," they added.
The companies said that being shuttered for even one month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its U.S. users and undermine its ability to attract advertisers and recruit content creators and employee talent.
Calling itself one of the "most important speech platforms" used in the United States, TikTok has said that there is no imminent threat to U.S. national security and that delaying enforcement of the law would allow the Supreme Court to consider the legality of the ban, and the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to evaluate the law as well.
Trump, who unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, has reversed his stance and promised during the presidential race this year that he would try to save TikTok. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, the day after the TikTok deadline under the law.