TikTok Takes on US Govt: Lawsuit Filed to Avoid Ban Hammer

TikTok is suing the US government over a law that threatens to stop its operations.

On Tuesday, May 7, TikTok filed a lawsuit in an attempt to overturn a US law that might result in a statewide ban on the popular social media platform.

This action comes after US President Joe Biden signed the measure into law, in response to legal warnings provided by TikTok.

This action paves the way for a court showdown wherein the 170 million US users of TikTok will have their First Amendment rights weighed against the security concerns of the US government about the platform's ties to China.

If TikTok loses this legal battle, its parent company ByteDance may have to remove the app from US app stores unless it sells the platform to a non-Chinese company by mid-January 2025.

TikTok and ByteDance contend in a lawsuit with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the new regulation violates the Constitution because it limits Americans' freedom of speech and their access to legal content.

The petition draws attention to how unusual it is for Congress to single out and essentially outlaw a particular social media site, depriving Americans of access to a worldwide online community that has over a billion members.

The US has long been concerned about TikTok's ties to China and the possibility that the Chinese government could access the personal data of its users, which is why this legal action has been taking place.

TikTok emphatically denies having access to such data and highlights that it is working to protect user information by storing it on servers that are controlled by US tech giant Oracle.

TikTok and ByteDance criticize the legislation's national security justification, calling it theoretical and predicated on faulty reasoning.

Lawmakers have been briefed in secret by national security officials on the subject of Chinese government access to TikTok data, despite the fact that the US government has not yet made available any hard proof of this.