Tiktok Hits Back At Trump's Ban With Lawsuit
So it seems the time for negotiations is over.
TikTok is heading to court today to challenge the Trump administration’s crackdown on the popular video-sharing app.
In a statement released to reporters, the company alleged that ever since the U.S. government announced that it will ban TikTok in the country, they have “sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution.
“What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.”
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‘Unconstitutional’
For this reason, TikTok felt it had “no choice but to challenge the executive order through the judicial system.
The company is expecting that the court will begin legal proceedings over their formal charge this week, according to BBC Business reporter Vivienne Nunis.
Still, TikTok is not the only Chinese-owned company struggling with regulatory restrictions in the United States.
Last Friday, a group of Chinese-Americans collectively sought judicial relief from the president’s ban on social networking app WeChat, which is owned by Tencent.
Lawyer Michael Bien, the counsel of the plaintiffs, said the ban is unconstitutional because violates users’ right to free speech.
“There are critical Constitutional protections at stake in this case,” he said. “What would be the reaction if the President banned, shut down, or criminalized the use of Zoom, Messenger, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or Instagram by invoking a vague and undefined ‘national security’ problem since they also collect and analyze user data?”
The E.O. in Question
For supporters of the TikTok ban, though, there is nothing ‘vague’ and ‘undefined’ about the concerns forwarded by the president in the executive order that gave TikTok parent firm ByteDance about three months to sell its operations in the country.
In the order, the government said the firm threatens to “impair the national security” of the U.S.
“TikTok’s data threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information -- potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information and blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.”
The measure comes ahead of this year’s polls, in which Trump is campaigning behind the promise of an increasingly strict anti-Beijing stance.