Tiktok Sues To Challenge Law Forcing Sale Or Ban

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance sued Tuesday to challenge a law President Joe Biden signed to force the sale or ban of the video sharing app.

The petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit claims the law violates the First Amendment rights of its 170 million American users. It says the law shuts down the platform based on "speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation.”

“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban,” the filing said.

Biden signed the law that would force TikTok’s sale within a year, or face a ban in U.S. app stores, as part of foreign aid package passed in late April.

TikTok's argument: TikTok and ByteDance called for a review of the constitutionality of the law, which they claimed did not meet the burden of proof of the harms it aimed to prevent.

"Congress itself has offered nothing to suggest that the TikTok platform poses the types of risks to data security or the spread of foreign propaganda that could conceivably justify the Act,” ByteDance and Tiktok wrote.

The Biden administration and Congress have defended the law, saying a Chinese national security law allows the government to demand U.S. user data from Beijing-based ByteDance, and that China pushes propaganda via the app’s algorithms. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a March report that China used TikTok to influence the 2022 U.S. elections.

The companies argued that the law would amount to a Bill of Attainder, or a determination of guilt and punishment by law without trial, which the Constitution prohibits. Legal experts have disagreed over whether the clause applies to restrictions on foreign corporations, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“Congress has never before crafted a two-tiered speech regime with one set of rules for one named platform, and another set of rules for everyone else," TikTok and ByteDance wrote.

TikTok has said it is not a security threat and that its parent company is not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. CEO Shou Zi Chew said in January that TikTok has invested $2 billion in safety efforts across the platform. The company in 2022 launched a project to protect U.S.-based data by storing it in U.S.-based cloud servers owned by Oracle.

China’s government has said it “firmly opposes” a forced sale of TikTok, and would not allow the export of TikTok’s algorithm, which is the most valuable part of the app.

The backstory: It’s the third time TikTok has gone to court to fight back a potential ban of the app in the U.S. In the past two cases, judges have sided with its arguments.

Last November, a federal judge ruled that a Montana law banning TikTok in the state likely violated the First Amendment. Montana’s attorney general has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 2020, federal judges blocked the Trump administration’s executive order banning TikTok, finding it likely exceeded the president’s authority.

What’s next: TikTok could next file an injunction with the D.C. Circuit to block the law from going into effect. Legal analysts expect the case to eventually reach the Supreme Court.