TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the United States after President Joe Biden signed a bill that requires parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform.
ByteDance has until January 19 to sell the app or face penalties.
“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere,” the lawsuit reads, according to The Daily Mail.
The lawsuit notes that TikTok has spent $2 billion in security measures to protect U.S. user data.
It adds that the Chinese government has “made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States,” the lawsuit states, meaning that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would not allow the sale of the algorithm that highlights the platform’s success.
“China also enacted an additional export control law that ‘gives the Chinese government new policy tools and justifications to deny and impose terms on foreign commercial transactions,'” the filing explains, suggesting that the social media site does not operate independently of the CCP. “China adopted these enhanced export control restrictions between August and October 2020, shortly after President Trump’s August 6, 2020 and August 14, 2020 executive orders targeting TikTok.”
Senior Fellow of the American Foreign Policy Council Michael Sobolik wrote on X that TikTok’s lawsuit “literally” makes the “national security case for the U.S. government.”
American Faith reported that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to file a lawsuit following the TikTok ban on “constitutional grounds.”
“I’m going to file a lawsuit challenging the TikTok ban on Constitutional grounds,” Kennedy wrote on X.
“Don’t be fooled — the TikTok ban is not about China harvesting your data. That’s a smoke screen. Intelligence agencies from lots of countries, especially ours, are harvesting your data from everywhere all the time,” Kennedy continued. “TikTok isn’t even majority Chinese-owned, and the company agreed to put its data behind a U.S. firewall. The Biden administration rejected that deal.”
