Social network TikTok today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily halt an imminent ban as TikTok waits for the appeal process to play out. TikTok is set to be banned from U.S. app stores starting on January 19 because parent company ByteDance did not sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company as mandated by a bill in April.
TikTok is calling on the Supreme Court to hear its appeal, and it is sticking with the free speech argument that the lower appeals court denied. The petition that TikTok submitted to the Supreme Court claims that Congress has "enacted a massive and unprecedented speech restriction," and that TikTok is one of the "most popular and important venues for communication" in the U.S.
U.S. lawmakers gave ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok to a company not located in China, but ByteDance has maintained that doing so would be impossible. ByteDance says that it is not able to give the TikTok source code to a new owner because it would take years for engineers to become familiar enough wit
