US Government Sees Lawsuit over TikTok Ban

US Government Sees Lawsuit over TikTok Ban

They’ve Done It

ByteDance has done it. In early May of 2024, A Court Filing was released challenging the bill recently signed by POTUS Joe Biden which aimed to ban TikTok and social networking applications like it. Indeed, TikTok challenged it, seeing the bill as “unconstitutional” and that the bill would unlawfully force a shutdown of the company if it could not sell before 2025. This latter condition, TikTok argues, is unreasonable and forms a part of what they believe is a targeted campaign against them.

Indeed, because of the wording of the bill, TikTok believes that the US government aims to downplay the bill’s nature as a ban. In their view, the bill’s proponents are not only conscious of the bill’s potential unconstitutionality, but are actively trying to get around any regulations to bring TikTok down. Under this understanding, the bill unfairly targets TikTok under the flimsy justification that it is trying to regulate TikTok and its presence in the United States.

Legal Challenge

One argument of the legal challenge is that the alternative to the outright ban offered by the bill, selling to an American provider, would not only be infeasible but harmful to the American consumer. The social media giant goes on to say that millions of lines of source code would need to make the jump to this new provider, something that regulatory groups in China would not allow. Without access to this source code, an American provider with the rights to TikTok would output a service which would be lesser than what the rest of the world can access from ByteDance.

Community

Another argument is that the ban itself is in contempt of the Constitution’s first amendment and that it allows the US Government to use restrict or undercut free speech rights under an umbrella national security concern. TikTok has a large globally connected community which is responsible for its content. A successful ban or restriction of TikTok’s autonomy would end in American users being cut off from the speech and iformation from that global community, potentially infringing on Americans’ freedom of information online.

TikTok’s main request is that the court see the filing and judge the Biden administration’s law as unconstitutional. The court will also consider preventing the United States’ Attorney General from enforcing the law.

Source:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151242/tiktok-sues-us-divestment-ban

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