The IT Nerd

To quote Dr. Strange from the movie Avengers: Infinity War, “We’re in the endgame now”.

ByteDance is gambling on fighting the TikTok ban that President Joe Biden signed into law yesterday by winning in court:

 TikTok’s chief executive said on Wednesday the social media company expects to win a legal challenge to block legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden that he said would ban its popular short video app used by 170 million Americans.

“Rest assured – we aren’t going anywhere,” CEO Shou Zi Chew said in a video posted moments after Biden signed the bill that gives China-based ByteDance 270 days to divest TikTok’s US assets or face a ban. “The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail again.”

I say that it’s a gamble because there’s no guarantee that they will win in court. Yes there’s been a couple of cases where TikTok has fought off bans by going to court, but this time might be different:

Congress is arguing that TikTok poses a national-security risk, and the courts tend to defer to that governing body when it comes to issues of national security, experts told Business Insider. The federal government has more authority on that subject than a state like Montana does.

“The court will look at the merits of the case, but really driven by deference to Congress as having much more understanding of the national-security risks than the judges themselves do,” Matthew Schettenhelm, a senior litigation analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told BI. Schettenhelm estimated the law had a 70% chance of surviving a legal challenge.

So what this means is that ByteDance may be placing itself in a position where they have guaranteed that TikTok will be banned. And the clock is ticking. If I were them, I’d be queuing up a plan B. Like, right now.

This entry was posted on April 25, 2024 at 11:58 am and is filed under Commentary with tags TikTok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.