TikTok request to temporarily halt U.S. ban rejected by court [Video]

WASHINGTON –

A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected an emergency bid by TikTok to temporarily block a law that would require its Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest of the short-video app by Jan. 19 or face a ban on the app.

TikTok and ByteDance on Monday filed the emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to make their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Friday’s ruling means that TikTok now must quickly move to the Supreme Court in an attempt to halt the pending ban.

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

“The petitioners have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has …