After a federal court last week denied TikTok’s request to put a halt to a law that could ban the app in the United States, the company is now turning to the Supreme Court in an attempt to buy time. The social media company has asked the court to temporarily block the law, which is currently set to take effect on January 19, 2025, it said in a brief statement.
“The Supreme Court has an established record of upholding Americans’ right to free speech,” TikTok wrote in a post on TikTok. “Today, we are asking the Court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to a ban on speech and conclude that it violates the First Amendment.”
The company, which has argued that the law is unconstitutional, lost its initial legal challenge to the law earlier this month. The company then requested a delay in the law’s implementation, saying President-elect Donald Trump had said he would “save” TikTok. That request was denied Friday.
In its filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok again referenced Trump’s comments. It wrote, “It would not be in anyone’s interest — not the parties, the public, or the courts — that the Act’s ban on TikTok take effect only to have its enforcement halted hours, days, or weeks later.” Trump’s swearing-in would take place one day after the ban on the app takes effect.
TikTok is now hoping the Supreme Court will intervene to suspend the law to give the company time to make its final legal appeals. Otherwise, app stores and internet service providers would be forced to begin blocking TikTok next month, making the app inaccessible to its 170 million U.S. users.
Following an investigation by Forbes into TikTok Live, TikTok conducted its own review, called “Project Meramec,” according to the lawsuit. The company found that “millions of children” were bypassing TikTok’s age restrictions, hosting livestreams and interacting with adults.
Since TikTok keeps a portion of the sales of digital gifts in livestreams, the company was technically making money on the “transactional gifts” rather than the “nudity and sexual activity” that occurred during the stream. And since TikTok’s algorithm favors livestreams where virtual gifts are being exchanged, the lawsuit says some of these sexually exploitative streams were also distributed more widely than they would have been otherwise.