In late April, US President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that requires TikTok"s parent company ByteDance to sell off its interest in the social networking company, or it could be banned in the country. Today, as expected, TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the US government to fight the enforcement of the new law.
The recently signed law says that the China-owned ByteDance must sell off TikTok 270 days after the law was signed, President Biden could give ByteDance a 90-day extension if the government feels a deal is close to being made. If TikTok is not sold off by the deadline, the US could ban the service from US app stores.
The supporters of the law have argued they don"t want to actually ban TikTok, but they do want to separate it from ByteDance due to US security concerns that data from TikTok"s owners could be sent to the Chinese government. The government has offered no evidence that this could happen and TikTok has repeatedly denied this scenario will happen.
In its filing today in the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia (via The Verge), TikTok stated:
For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.
TikTok added that this new law is "unconstitutional", and added that the deadline to sell off the social network is "simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally." Even if such a selloff was possible, TikTok says that it would still be unconstitutional, adding:
If upheld, it would allow the government to decide that a company may no longer own and publish the innovative and unique speech platform it created. 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.
TikTok is asking the court to rule that the law is unconstitutional and that the US Attorney General be barred from enforcing the law. The legal stage is now set for what could be a long court battle between TikTok and the US government.