Washington
CNN
—
TikTok filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block a U.S. law that could force a nationwide ban on the popular app, following legal threats the company issued after President Joe Biden signed the bill last month.
The court challenge sparks a historic legal battle in which U.S. security concerns about TikTok's ties to China threaten the First Amendment rights of TikTok's 170 million U.S. users. It will determine whether you can overcome it.
The stakes of this lawsuit are existential for TikTok. If it loses, TikTok could be banned from U.S. app stores unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sells the app to a non-Chinese entity by mid-January 2025.
TikTok and ByteDance said in a petition filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the law is unconstitutional because it stifles Americans' speech and prevents them from accessing lawful information. It is claimed that
The petition alleges that the U.S. government has “taken the unprecedented step of explicitly identifying and banning” short-form video apps in an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional power.
“For the first time in history, Congress will subject a single designated speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, allowing every American to participate in a unique online community of more than 1 billion members,” the petition reads. “We have enacted a law prohibiting this.” People all over the world. ”
The White House referred questions about TikTok's legal challenges to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit follows long-standing U.S. claims that TikTok's ties to China could expose Americans' personal information to the Chinese government.
TikTok strongly denies ever giving Chinese government officials access to U.S. user data and says it has taken steps to protect the information by hosting it on servers owned by U.S. tech giant Oracle. Ta.
The moves are part of a 90-page draft agreement submitted to a multi-agency government committee known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which has been reviewing TikTok's U.S. operations since 2019, according to the petition. That's what it means. The same draft agreement also includes authority for the U.S. government to shut down TikTok if TikTok or ByteDance “violates certain obligations under the agreement,” the petition says.
But these assurances do not allay concerns from U.S. officials, including that China will use TikTok data to identify intelligence targets, spread propaganda, and exercise other forms of covert influence. There are also concerns that this may be the case.
The U.S. government has so far not publicly provided any concrete evidence of Chinese government access to TikTok data. U.S. lawmakers have received confidential briefings from national security officials, but the materials from those meetings have not been declassified.
Reactions to the press conference were mixed, with one House Republican saying there was “no concrete information to support substantive evidence” and one House Democratic lawmaker saying the issue was ultimately about a “malicious threat” from China. The decision will come down to whether or not to limit the impact.
But Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the sponsor of the TikTok bill, said on the Senate floor in April that the briefing provided important insight into the risks posed by TikTok.
“Many Americans, especially young Americans, are understandably skeptical of any legislation cracking down on TikTok,” Warner said in his remarks. “At the end of the day, they haven't seen what Congress has seen. They haven't participated in a classified conference held by Congress that delved deeper into some of the threats posed by foreign control of TikTok.”
In March, these concerns came to a head with the enactment of a law giving TikTok about six months to sell or face a ban in the United States. Although it passed the House, it stalled in the Senate until an updated version of the bill was rushed and attached to a massive foreign aid package that would benefit Israel and Ukraine.
US policymakers have described the law in question as a forced sale of TikTok, rather than an outright ban on the app. But TikTok maintains that the only possible outcome if the law is followed is a ban.
“The 'qualified sale' required by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is commercially, technically and legally impossible,” Tuesday's petition states. It is being
TikTok and ByteDance called the national security concerns at the heart of the TikTok bill “speculative and analytically flawed,” and said the bill's quick passage was due to Congressional drafters calling it a First Amendment law. “It reflects how they relied on speculation rather than 'evidence,'” the petition added. “is necessary,” he argues.
First Amendment scholars say there is some merit to TikTok's claims. For example, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. government cannot prohibit Americans from receiving foreign propaganda if they wish. The bill, known as the Berman Amendment, also underscores this point by prohibiting the U.S. president from blocking the free flow of media from foreign countries, even countries deemed hostile to the United States. ing.
“National security claims should not trump the First Amendment,” said Evelyn Dweck, an assistant professor at Stanford University who studies online platform regulation. “Otherwise, the Constitution becomes a papier-mâché tiger. At the very least, the government should be required to provide evidence of its claims. However, there are precedents. [Supreme] Courts have ignored these principles, particularly in the context of counterterrorism and foreign speech. ”
TikTok won some early court victories last year as multiple U.S. states tried to crack down on the app, foreshadowing a battle over online speech. In Montana, the only state to pass its own TikTok ban affecting personal devices, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law, calling it unconstitutional and “harmful.” [users’] It would give them First Amendment rights and cut off a source of income that many people rely on. ”
Gautam Hans, associate director of Cornell University's First Amendment Clinic, said the bipartisan nature of the law signed by Biden could convince a court of the seriousness of the national security concerns surrounding TikTok. He said there is. Still, Hans said, “Without a public discussion of what the risks specifically are, it's hard to see why a court would need to justify such an unprecedented law.” Ta.
In addition to potentially infringing on the speech rights of TikTok users in the U.S., the federal law being challenged by TikTok also implicates the constitutional rights of Apple and Google, so if the ban goes into effect, TikTok will be banned from the app stores of both companies.
“This raises concerns that the government could violate the Constitution in these platforms' decisions about what content they host,” said Jennifer, a researcher at the liberal Cato Institute. Huddleston said in an op-ed last month. “Furthermore, it could set a dangerous precedent for government intervention in online spaces, which many people would find averse to offline spaces.”
However, the U.S. government and more than half of U.S. states restrict the use of TikTok from government devices, reflecting the government's power to control its own property. Internationally, TikTok is banned on government devices in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission. The app has been banned across India since 2020.
Some U.S. officials have been trying to ban TikTok from the United States since 2020, when former President Donald Trump moved to block the app with an executive order. (Trump has since reversed his stance, saying that banning TikTok would only help Meta, which Trump blames for his 2020 election loss.)
The outcome of the TikTok case is likely to have far-reaching implications for how the U.S. government regulates technology and other foreign speech, Dweck said.
“It's very important that we don't think about this in terms of just TikTok, but in terms of all foreign platforms in the future,” Douek said. “In a globalized world, this issue will come up again and again. And at this stage, we are basing our decision-making on platforms based on mere concerns about the possibility of future harm, rather than actual and clear present danger.” It would be very worrying if the government was given the power to simply ban it.”
