TikTok Inc. and its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd. filed a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government on Tuesday seeking to block legislation that could lead to a nationwide ban on the popular short-form video sharing platform.
The companies say the law, signed by President Joe Biden last month, baselessly names the social media platform as a national security threat and tramples on the free speech rights of TikTok's 170 million users in the United States. He argued that it was a “violation of the Constitution” because there was a possibility that
Photo illustration shows the TikTok app on a mobile phone on March 13, 2024 in New York. (Getty/Kyodo News)
“If Congress could do this, it could invoke national security and circumvent the First Amendment by ordering individual newspaper and website publishers to sell to avoid closure.” they said in a petition filed with the federal appeals court. District of Columbia Circuit.
“For TikTok, such a sale would separate Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform dedicated to shared content, fundamentally violating the Constitution's commitment to both free speech and individual liberty. “It will be,” they said.
The law, which went into effect with bipartisan support, requires ByteDance to exit the app within a year or face a ban in the United States.
The petition says it is “not commercially, technically, or legally viable” for the parent company to shut down TikTok's U.S. operations within that time frame.
TikTok and ByteDance, which have more than 1 billion users around the world, have consistently denied ever giving the Chinese government or Communist Party access to the information of their U.S. users.
U.S. officials and lawmakers remain concerned that ByteDance could give Chinese authorities access, given that national security laws in Asian countries require companies to cooperate in gathering intelligence.
China reacted harshly to the development, insisting that the US has shown no evidence that TikTok poses a national security threat and accusing the US government of interfering with the company's normal business operations. There is.
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