A judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday rejected a request by three TikTok content creators who asked her to temporarily block a US government ban on Apple Inc and Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc to offer the short-video sharing app for download in their app stores.
The content creators argued they would “lose access to tens of thousands of potential viewers and creators every month, an effect amplified by the looming threat to close TikTok altogether.”
‘INCONVENIENCE’
US District Judge Wendy Beetlestone said that the ban, set to take effect today, is “undoubtedly an inconvenience,” but added that the content creators “will still be able to create, publish, and share content for their millions of current followers.”
A separate legal challenge from TikTok and its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) to the US Department of Commerce order is still pending. A hearing on the issue before US District Judge Carl Nichols is set for 9:30am today in Washington.
ByteDance on Sunday last week said that it had negotiated a preliminary deal with Walmart Inc and Oracle Corp to take stakes in the app’s US operations, but the exact terms remain unclear.
The commerce department gave the companies an additional week to finalize a deal before an order banning TikTok from US app stores takes effect.
TikTok has an estimated 100 million users in the US and 700 million worldwide, making it one of the largest in the social media space.
USER RELATIONSHIP
A ban would not only lead to lost revenue, but also inflict “extraordinary harm to [TikTok’s] reputation and goodwill, making it unlikely that these relationships could be salvaged even if the ban is later lifted,” company lawyers said.
A ban “will cause our user base to stagnate and then precipitously decline,” TikTok US general manager Vanessa Pappas said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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