Two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Edward Markey and Representative Ro Khanna, are urging Congress and President Joe Biden to extend the January 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of TikTok or face a U.S. ban. The Supreme Court is set to hold arguments on Friday on TikTok and ByteDance’s challenge to the law, which requires the company to divest its U.S. operations by the specified deadline.
A lawyer for ByteDance, Noel Francisco, argues that it would be impossible to complete a sale by the deadline and that a ban would result in the platform shutting down and “essentially go dark”. Francisco warned that existing users would lose access to the short video app, which has 170 million American users.
Senator Markey is planning to introduce legislation to delay the deadline by an additional 270 days, calling a ban “dismantling a one-of-a-kind informational and cultural ecosystem, silencing millions in the process”. He expressed concern that a ban would have serious consequences for millions of Americans who depend on the app for social connections and economic livelihoods.
Representative Khanna urged Biden and President-elect Donald Trump to “put a pause on this ban” to prevent 170 million Americans from losing their free speech and to protect millions of Americans’ livelihoods.
If the court does not block the law by Sunday, new downloads of TikTok will be banned, but existing users will be able to continue accessing the app for a period of time before services degrade and eventually stop working. The White House has not yet commented on the issue.