The Department of Justice reportedly appealed a federal judge’s order that stopped the Commerce Department from imposing restrictions on Chinese social media app TikTok.
The government was filing an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, according to Reuters.
After declaring TikTok a threat to national security from the Chinese Communist Party, the Trump administration attempted to clamp down on the short video-sharing platform. TikTok was the most-downloaded app in the world in 2020 and had the second-highest consumer spending and the eighth-most active monthly users of any mobile app, according to data from App Annie.
The government previously ordered ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to sell off its U.S. operations, and President Trump had given his “blessing” to a proposal to sell the operations to Walmart and Oracle. The deadline for that deal came and passed earlier this month without a conclusion.
U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols in Washington, D.C., agreed with other courts, including another federal court, earlier this month and ruled that the Commerce Department’s attempt to impose restrictions on TikTok was “arbitrary and capricious.” Those restrictions were supposed to go into effect on Nov. 12.
Thomas Byron, a senior appellate counselor at the Justice Department, said the government was trying to implement a “de facto ban” on TikTok by preventing people from using or downloading the app. Byron said videos from TikTok could still be shared from web browsers, but individuals in the United States would not be able to create accounts on the social media platform.
Judges who are skeptical of the ban have argued that it would violate users’ right to engage in free speech on the app.
“By forbidding new users from joining, this prohibition bans a lot of Americans from joining the communications and exchanges that I think more than a quarter of the American population is already engaged in,” appeals court Judge Patricia Millett said. “For all those people who wish to join in those communications — they’re banned. How are they not banned?”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DOJ and TikTok for further comment.
