TikTok loses appeal, faces divestment deadline

A U.S. appeals court on Friday denied TikTok’s emergency request to temporarily halt a law mandating its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest ownership of the popular short-video app by January 19. Failure to comply with the order could result in TikTok facing a nationwide ban.

TikTok and ByteDance on Monday filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to present their cases to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The companies warned that without court action, the law would “shut down TikTok—one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms—for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users.”