Is TikTok really getting banned?

In April, Congress passed a bill requiring TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to divest from and sell the platform to an American company by Jan. 19, 2025, in order for TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. However, ByteDance has said it would rather shut down TikTok than sell it and has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop the ban from being enforced. Yahoo News’ Sam Matthews explains.

Video Transcript

Hey, let's talk about tiktok.So after a few attempts in April Congress passed a bill requiring Tik Tok's parent company, the China based bike bands to sell the platform to a US based company by January 19th 2025.If they want to keep operating in the United States, the tiktok ban was just part of a much larger spending package that was mainly focused on military aid to Israel and to Ukraine.But because President Biden has signed it into law now it kind of has to happen.Tik Tok is already banned on government devices and Bytedance has already said it would rather shut tiktok down than sell it.But in the meantime, they filed a lawsuit saying they really shouldn't have to because the ban would violate the first amendment.Parallel to this tiktok is arguing that a sale would be impossible from a technological standpoint, claiming that quote, millions of lines of software code that have been painstakingly developed by thousands of engineers would have to be moved to a large alternative team of engineers.A team they say does not exist so short of a sale.The only way for tiktok to prevent the ban from going into effect is through the Court of appeals.