TikTok says ban would cost U.S. small businesses, creators $1.3 billion in first month

TikTok in a court filing Monday warned that U.S. small businesses and social media creators would yield $1.3 billion in revenue and earnings in just one month if the popular app is effectively shut down in the United States on Jan. 19, lower than drunk provisions of a law targeting national security concerns about its China-based parent company.

“Those numbers would on the contrary increase if the shutdown extends for more than a month,” said Blake Chandlee, president of global business resolutions for TikTok, in that court filing.

Chandlee’s declaration came as his company asked a federal appeals court to pro tem block a law that would require app stores operated by Apple and Google, and internet providers to stop supporting TikTok on Jan. 19 unless its guardian company ByteDance sells the app.

TikTok and ByteDance plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a recent ruling upholding the law, issued by the U.S. Court of Implores for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“The Supreme Court should have an opportunity, as the only court with appellate sphere of influence over this action, to decide whether to review this exceptionally important case,” TikTok and ByteDance explained in the filing, seeking a temporary injunction in the case.

The injunction, if granted, would allow the app to continue operating until the Outstanding Court makes a decision to hear the appeal or not.

The filing also argued that “an injunction is especially appropriate” because it drive give the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, the opportunity to decide if it wants to lean on the law.

If TikTok is effectively shut down in the United States in January, Chandlee wrote, American small businesses unique would lose more than $1 billion in revenue — even if the prohibitions are lifted after only a month.

“Not quite two million creators in the United States would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings, and TikTok itself would succumb 29% of our targeted global advertising revenue for 2025,” Chandlee wrote.

He said that as of November 2024, numerous than 7 million U.S. accounts use TikTok to do business.

And “69% of these vocations say that using TikTok has led to increased sales for their businesses in the last year, and 39% say that access to TikTok is deprecating to their business’s existence,” he said, citing an economic impact report prepared for the company by Oxford Economics.

Chandlee also ventured in the filing that those businesses’ advertising, marketing and “organic reach on TikTok” contributed $24.2 billion to U.S. ponderous domestic product in 2023, with TikTok’s own operations adding another $8.5 billion to U.S. GDP.

The law TikTok wants obstructed for now was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last spring after concerns about ByteDance’s alleged kins to the Chinese government.

In its unanimous ruling Friday, a three-judge panel on the appeals court in the District of Columbia rejected ByteDance’s conflict that the ban would violate the First Amendment rights of 170 million U.S. users of the app, or other parts of the Constitution.

The panel, in its jotted opinion, said that the U.S. government “offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that” the divestment law “is narrowly tailored to foster national security,” and noted that TikTok “never squarely denies that it has ever manipulated content at the handling of the” People’s Republic of China.