The fight over TikTok’s presence here in the United States has been ongoing for some time, but last month, a bill was passed that would ultimately force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to either sell TikTok to an American company and divest from the CCP or face a total ban in the states.
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In April, the ban was passed inside the $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The vote “represents a bipartisan breakthrough against the CCP’s most powerful tool of information warfare against the United States” according to Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY).
TikTok would be a major acquisition for any American company and a few have already expressed interest, including Rumble which has offered to become a “cloud technology partner” with TikTok.
But ByeDance isn’t taking this ban without a fight and has already mounted a defense by going on the offense.
According to the Associated Press, ByteDance has launched a lawsuit against the U.S. government, stating that this is “obviously illegal” and saying it violates the First Amendment:
“Congress has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok: a vibrant online forum for protected speech and expression used by 170 million Americans to create, share, and view videos over the Internet,” ByteDance said in its suit. “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.”
The law requires TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to sell the platform within nine months. If a sale is already in progress, the company will get another three months to complete the deal. ByteDance has said it “doesn’t have any plan to sell TikTok.” But even it wanted to divest, the company would have to get a blessing from Beijing, which previously opposed a forced sale of the platform and has signaled its opposition this time around.
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TikTok’s position is that the excuse from the U.S. government that The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is only masked as a “regulation of ownership” and is actually a ban, as there’s no way TikTok can be divested and sold any time soon.
While the fight is only beginning, some experts believe that TikTok has a very good chance of winning.
“The First Amendment means the government can’t restrict Americans’ access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here,” said Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Gautam Hans, law professor and associated director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell University, sees some complications ahead for ByteDance’s lawsuit but equally sees the U.S. government’s law not holding up in court.
“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, a law professor and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell University. “Without public discussion of what exactly the risks are, however, it’s difficult to determine why the courts should validate such an unprecedented law.”
While the vote in congress was bipartisan, so was the resistance to the TikTok ban.
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Both Democrats and Republicans, leftists and conservatives, have made their voices clear in resisting the ban of First Amendment grounds. Various politicians weren’t as keen on the ban as well, with Thomas Massie signaling this is ultimately a Democrat plot for control of the internet that Republicans were helping with.
(READ: Thomas Massie Sounds the Alarm About the Democrat’s Trojan Horse Inside the TikTok Ban)
This issue remains a contentious one with no clear political divide and will likely remain so as the lawsuit moves forward.