A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as next month, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company’s challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though its unclear whether the court will take up the case.

“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.”

Though the case is squarely in the court system, it’s also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action.

“He wants to save TikTok,” Rep. Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said Friday during an interview on Fox Business.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.

The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect. The European Union on Friday expressed similar concerns as it investigates intelligence that suggests Russia possibly abused the platform to influence the elections in Romania.