Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday urged Congress and President Joe Biden to extend a Jan. 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of TikTok or face a U.S. ban.
TakeAway Points:
- Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday urged Congress and President Joe Biden to extend a Jan. 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of TikTok or face a U.S. ban.
- The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by Meta Platforms to avoid a multi-billion dollar class action by advertisers that accused the Facebook and Instagram parent company of overcharging them by inflating the number of people their ads might reach.
TikTok ban deadline may be extended
The Supreme Court held arguments Friday on Tiktok and ByteDance’s challenge to the law. A lawyer for the companies, Noel Francisco, said it would be impossible to complete a sale by next week’s deadline.
He said if banned, the short video app used by 170 million Americans would quickly go dark and “essentially the platform shuts down.”
Biden could extend the deadline by 90 days if he certifies ByteDance is making substantial progress toward a divestiture but it is unlikely ByteDance could meet that standard.
Senator Edward Markey said he planned to introduce legislation to delay the deadline by which ByteDance must sell TikTok or face a ban by an additional 270 days.
“A ban would dismantle a one-of-a-kind informational and cultural ecosystem, silencing millions in the process,” Markey said Monday.
“A TikTok ban would impose serious consequences on millions of Americans who depend on the app for social connections and their economic livelihood. We cannot allow that to happen.”
President-elect Donald Trump has asked the court to delay implementation of the law, arguing he should have time after taking office on Jan. 20 to pursue a “political resolution” to the issue.
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, on Monday urged Biden and Trump “to put a pause on this ban so 170 million Americans don’t lose their free speech. Millions of Americans’ livelihoods will be ended if this ban takes place.”
If the court does not block the law by Sunday, new downloads of TikTok on Apple or Google app stores would be banned, but existing users could continue to access the app for some period. Services would degrade and eventually stop working as companies would be barred from providing support.
US Supreme Court rebuffs Meta bid to avoid advertisers’ lawsuit
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a request from Meta Platforms to stay out of a multibillion-dollar class action brought by advertisers who claimed the parent company of Facebook and Instagram overcharged them by inflating the potential audience for their ads.
The justices turned away Meta’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that let advertisers seek damages as a group over Meta’s claims about the “potential reach” of their ads.
A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Menlo Park, California-based Meta in March 2024. The panel said that because Meta provided the same alleged misrepresentation about how many people might see ads, the advertisers could try to prove that their damages, which they said could exceed $7 billion, stemmed from a “common course of conduct.”
Led by former Meta advertisers DZ Reserve and Cain Maxwell, the plaintiffs faulted Meta for focusing on the number of social media accounts, not the lower number of actual people, and said it fraudulently overestimated potential viewers by as much as 400%.
Class actions sometimes lead to greater recoveries at lower cost than when plaintiffs sue individually.
The class in this case covered potentially millions of individuals and businesses that have paid for ads on Facebook and Instagram since Aug. 15, 2014.
In its appeal, Meta said at least three federal appeals courts have rejected the “common course of conduct” test.
The company said the test ignored how some advertisers may have found its alleged misrepresentation immaterial or chose not to rely on it.
Meta also said the 9th Circuit, relative to nearly every other federal appeals court, gives too much deference to federal district judges who initially certify class actions, including in the advertisers’ case.
Ads generate substantially all of Meta’s revenue, which totalled $116.1 billion in the first nine months of 2024.
