Tiktok to battle U.S. ban
Tiktok and its parent company Bytedance challenged the U.S. government in a legal filing on Tuesday over a new law forcing the sale or ban of the social media giant, igniting a high-stakes court battle in Washington that could prove to be an existential fight for one of the world’s most popular apps.
President Joe Biden signed a law last month demanding that China-based Bytedance sell Tiktok within a year or be banned across the U.S., arguing that the Chinese government could use the app to spy on Americans or secretly shape public opinion.
But the companies in their petition for review contend that the law violates the First Amendment rights of its 170 million U.S. accounts in an “extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” based on vaguely expressed national-security concerns.
“Banning Tiktok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the Act’s sponsors recognized that reality, and therefore have tried mightily to depict the law not as a ban at all, but merely a regulation of Tiktok’s ownership,” the challenge states.
“In reality, there is no choice,” it adds. A forced sale “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.”
The case will set up a high-stakes showdown for the Biden administration, which has touted the law as a way to avoid previous failures to ban the app.
A loss in court for the government would set back years of backroom federal strategizing that produced one of the few national technology policies passed by Congress in two decades.
A win would force a change in control on the biggest foreign-owned tech platform to achieve mainstream prominence in the U.S., disrupting what has become a potent force in the online creator economy and a popular driver of American entrepreneurship and entertainment.
Bytedance, a private company that valued itself last year at $268 billion, has vowed to fight what it calls an unconstitutional government overreach.
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Tiktok chief executive Shou Zi Chew said in a Tiktok video last month. “The facts and the Constitution are on our side.”
In its 67-page petition for review of the law’s constitutionality, filed against Attorney General Merrick Garland, Tiktok and Bytedance argue that the law would give the government unprecedented power to control or dismantle a speech platform it dislikes.
It also challenges the government for targeting Tiktok and Bytedance by name in the law, as opposed to passing broader tech regulations for privacy or transparency that would cover the industry at large.
“If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down,” the filing says.
The U.S. has yet to show evidence that China has collected Tiktok’s user data for espionage or skewed its recommendation algorithm for propaganda, though the law’s sponsors have said the possibility of future influence is cause enough for aggressive action.