Company says U.S. creators could lose more than $1 billion in first month | Wilnesh News

TikTok warned in a court filing on Monday that under a legal provision targeting TikTok, U.S. small businesses and social media creators would have to wait for as little as a month if the popular app is effectively shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. $1.3 billion in lost revenue and profits.

“These numbers will only increase if the shutdown extends beyond a month,” Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, said in the court filing.

Chandlee’s statement came as his company asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block a law that would require app stores run by Apple and Google and internet providers to stop supporting TikTok on Jan. 19 unless it is sold by parent company ByteDance The application.

TikTok and the Byte Bounce Project are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the law.

TikTok and ByteDance said in the filing that “as the only court with appellate jurisdiction over this litigation, the Supreme Court should have the opportunity to decide whether to review this extremely important case” and sought a temporary injunction in the case.

If the ban is granted, the app will continue to operate until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the appeal.

The document also argued that the ban is “particularly appropriate” because it would give the administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20, an opportunity to decide whether to enforce the law.

Chandley wrote that if TikTok was effectively shut down in the United States in January, even if the ban was lifted a month later, U.S. small businesses alone would lose more than $1 billion in revenue.

“Nearly 2 million creators in the U.S. will suffer nearly $300 million in lost revenue, and TikTok itself will lose 29% of our global targeted ad revenue in 2025,” Chandley wrote.

He said that as of November 2024, more than 7 million U.S. accounts were using TikTok to conduct business.

“Sixty-nine percent of these businesses said that using TikTok led to an increase in their business’s sales last year, and 39% said that using TikTok was critical to their business’ survival,” he cited an economic impact report prepared for 2019 .

Chandley also stated in the document that the advertising, marketing and “organic influence on TikTok” of these companies contributed $24.2 billion to U.S. gross domestic product in 2023, and TikTok’s own business contributed to U.S. GDP. $8.5 billion.

The law TikTok hopes to temporarily block last spring over concerns about ByteDance’s alleged ties to the Chinese government was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden.

In a unanimous ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals rejected ByteDance’s argument that the ban would violate the First Amendment rights or other constitutional rights of the app’s 170 million U.S. users. part.

The panel said in written submissions that the U.S. government “provided persuasive evidence that the divestment law was specifically designed to protect national security,” noting that TikTok “has never explicitly denied that it ever manipulated Content “People’s Republic of China”.