Barring Supreme Court intervention in the next five weeks or so, TikTok may have to shut down its US operations, something that a legion of influencers making incomes from the platform are not happy about.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled that a federal law may proceed that requires Chinese company ByteDance to sell off TikTok's American operations to an American company or else shut down the app here on January 19.

This stems from a law passed by Congress in the spring that bans TikTok from operating here so long as the app is Chinese-owned — and its data could potentially be accessed by a hostile Chinese government. As we discussed back in April, TikTok had 270 days to identify an American buyer for the app, or for its American operations only. But experts concurred at the time that the forced sale was likely to be delayed by legal battles.

Now, as the New York Times reports, it will be up to the Supreme Court to step in and delay the law from taking effect, and this would have to happen before Inauguration Day, and before President-elect Trump could potentially step in himself. President Biden, for his part, is the one who signed the law.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns for several years about the possibility of user data from millions of American users falling into the hands of the Chinese government. Though ByteDance and its American operations have insisted that all American user data has been adequately secured and would not be shared.

All may not be as they say, though, and a case from two years ago in which ByteDance had to apologize for spying on two BuzzFeed journalists doesn't do well to bolster their pledges of respecting Americans' privacy.

Lawyers for TikTok say that any ban on the app would infringe on the First Amendment rights of American users. But the appeals court judges disagreed, writing in their ruling Friday, "The government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States."

The lawyers have vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, with company spokesperson Michael Hughes issuing a statement saying, "The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue."

It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court will deem the case worthy of its attention, or whether it may just let the appeals court ruling stand.

One expert, Georgetown University professor Anupam Chander who specializes in law and technology, predicts to the Times that the Supreme Court justices will issue an injunction freezing the law, allowing the case to be handed over to the incoming Trump administration. Chander previously predicted that the process of trying to sell TikTok off would be a "royal mess" — and the company now says it's impossible anyway, because the Chinese government won't allow it.

Meanwhile, former SF District Attorney Suzy Loftus has been on the inside of this battle, having joined the team at TikTok as director of safety in 2021. Loftus has touted the "unprecedented and voluntary steps that TikTok has taken to safeguard US user data," but it's not clear that those efforts mattered much in the legal proceeding.

Previously: California Joins 13 Other States in Suing TikTok for Alleged Harm It Causes to Teen Users

Photo: Solen Feyissa