The News
TikTok has filed a lawsuit challenging a law that seeks to force its Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app to a US entity or be banned. The complaint was filed on Tuesday in Washington DC’s federal appeals court.
TikTok argues that the new law is unconstitutional and violates American’s First Amendment right to free speech, according to the suit.
TikTok also alleges it has been denied equal protection under the law, which, it alleges, is akin to unlawful seizure of property, according to the documents.
“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025,” the lawsuit states, “silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.” One of TikTok’s greatest assets is its algorithm, and ByteDance has said it will not sell.
President Joe Biden signed the TikTok bill into law in April, giving TikTok a year to sell or be banned. TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew had promised to fight the law on freedom of speech grounds, and many TikTok creators and users have also decried the law’s passing.
Lawmakers appeared confident courts would uphold the law, however.
“It is telling that TikTok would rather spend its time, money, and effort fighting in court than solving the problem by breaking up with the CCP,” said Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich). Moolenaar is the GOP chairman of the House select committee on China. “I’m confident that our legislation will be upheld.”
SIGNALS
Bipartisanship may make judges sympathetic to the government
“The bipartisan nature of this federal law may make judges more likely to defer to a Congressional determination that the company poses a national security risk,” said Gautam Hans, the associated director at Cornell University’s First Amendment Clinic. While the Supreme Court has historically ruled against the government in cases where it has tried to limit free speech, the courts have also given the government “wide latitude” on national security, even if the government’s case is built on the potential for harm rather than actual evidence of wrongdoing, Center for Business and Human Rights researcher Paul Barrett wrote for The Hill.
ByteDance’s Chinese executives have more power than TikTok’s CEO
TikTok has tried to downplay its ties to ByteDance, including by headquartering in Singapore and Los Angeles, as well as storing US users’ data on America-based Oracle servers. But “TikTok’s ties to ByteDance go further than what the company presents,” a Rest of World investigation found. Several US-based TikTok employees said Chinese executives from ByteDance — and not TikTok’s Singaporean CEO Shou Zi Chew — manage key departments, and Chinese managers from sister app Douyin have been transferred to the US to work at TikTok. “[TikTok] is more Chinese than what I’m used to,” said one China-born employee who had previously worked at an American company. The deep ties between ByteDance and TikTok also underscore the difficulty in executing any divestment deal, Rest of World reported.
Foreign manipulation — not data privacy — is better argument for ban
The government argument about TikTok’s risk as a foreign propaganda peddler rather than a data privacy risk is a more compelling legal argument, according to law professor Alan Z. Rozenshtein. That’s because the US is a “notorious outlier” among developed countries for not having a national data privacy law. There are few restrictions on who can buy US users’ data from platforms, or what they do with it. “If the Chinese government wants data on Americans, they don’t need TikTok to get it,” Rozenshtein wrote in Lawfare. In contrast, arguing Beijing uses TikTok to manipulate public opinion is “specific to Chinese control over TikTok,” he wrote, which eclipses any potential nefarious data behavior by US firms like Meta or Google. .
