A US appeals court on Friday upheld a law requiring TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the platform or face a ban next year, dealing a blow to the Chinese company behind the video application.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden earlier this year, mandates that TikTok be banned in the country if the app does not divest from its parent company by January 19, 2025, the day before Donald Trump takes office. .

The unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the law, which cuts to the heart of a hot-button national security issue involving China and received strong bipartisan support in Congress, was constitutional. and did not violate the First Amendment. protections for freedom of expression, as TikTok had stated.

The “government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary's ability to collect data about individuals in the United States,” the panel wrote.

The decision puts TikTok in a precarious position in one of its largest markets, although the political future of the law is uncertain. On the campaign trail before his re-election, Trump said he opposed banning the platform and promised to “save” the app.

The law requires Apple and Google to remove the social media app, popular among younger Gen Z users, from their app stores if a divestment does not occur by the January deadline. It also prohibits the application on web hosting services.

TikTok said after the ruling: “The Supreme Court has an established record of protecting Americans' right to free speech, and we hope it will do just that on this important constitutional issue.

“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed based on inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in complete censorship of the American people.”

The US Justice Department, the Chinese embassy in Washington and a Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In May, TikTok and ByteDance sued the US government to block the bill, claiming it was unconstitutional and violated First Amendment free speech protections. TikTok has denied that China's government has any control over the app or that it has handed over data to Beijing. Their lawyers also argued that concerns about propaganda on the app should be addressed by requiring disclosures, rather than a blanket divestment or ban law.

U.S. officials have argued that ByteDance could be forced to share the personal information of TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users with officials in Beijing under Chinese law, and use the app’s algorithms and moderation to spread propaganda and disinformation. Earlier this year, the Justice Department alleged that some of the data of American TikTok users had been stored in China.

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The court said Friday that the government's national security "justifications" for the law were "compelling." China "poses a particularly significant hybrid trade threat" because of statutes governing Chinese companies, the judges said, adding that Beijing also "uses its cyber capabilities to support its influence campaigns around the world."

China has “positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok to serve its own ends,” the judges wrote. Their “ability to do so is at odds with the fundamentals of free speech.”

The judges acknowledged that their ruling “has important implications” for the app and its users. But they argued that “the burden is attributable to [China’s] hybrid trade threat to US national security,” rather than to the US government, which “engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in a effort to find an alternative solution.”

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TikTok has complained that much of the US government's evidence is classified, meaning it has not had a chance to reject claims about it, and argued that a sale would be "unviable."

Beijing has publicly said it would not allow ByteDance to divest the platform’s recommendations algorithm, and it has export control laws that would block such a spinoff.

TikTok is likely to seek an order temporarily preventing the law from taking effect while it awaits further action from the Supreme Court. Biden could also extend the ban or sale deadline by 90 days.

Before his re-election, Trump said he would not ban TikTok upon his return to the White House, in an attempt to preserve “competition” in a market dominated by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which the president-elect has called an “enemy of the people.” “.

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It's unclear exactly how you were able to save the app. Experts suggested he could tell Congress to repeal the law or pressure the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Any move would represent a U-turn from 2020, when then-President Trump issued an executive order to block the app in the US and gave ByteDance 90 days to divest its US assets and any data TikTok had. collected in the U.S. That order was blocked by the courts and ultimately overturned by Biden.

Shares of TikTok rivals Meta and Snap, whose revenues have been threatened by the app’s rapid growth in recent years, gained 2 percent and 3 percent respectively on the news.

Additional reporting by Demetri Sebastopulo in Washington