We all knew this was coming, and the much expected lawsuit by TikTok against the US government has been filed:
TikTok and ByteDance filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
“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,” the company said in the 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.”
“Banning TikTok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the Act’s sponsors recognized that reality, and therefore have tried mightily to depict the law not as a ban at all, but merely a regulation of TikTok’s ownership. According to its sponsors, the Act responds to TikTok’s ultimate ownership by ByteDance Ltd., a company with Chinese subsidiaries whose employees support various ByteDance businesses, including TikTok. They claim that the Act is not a ban because it offers ByteDance a choice: divest TikTok’s U.S. business or be shut down.”
TikTok added in the complaint, “If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down.”
This should be fun to watch. I say that because while I am not a lawyer, actual lawyers have said that courts tend to side with the US government when it comes to national security issues. So this might be a last roll of the dice by TikTok and ByteDance. And if it fails, we’ll likely see if all their talk of not selling out is just talk or not.
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This entry was posted on May 7, 2024 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags TikTok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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TikTok Sues The US Government
We all knew this was coming, and the much expected lawsuit by TikTok against the US government has been filed:
TikTok and ByteDance filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
“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,” the company said in the 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.”
“Banning TikTok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the Act’s sponsors recognized that reality, and therefore have tried mightily to depict the law not as a ban at all, but merely a regulation of TikTok’s ownership. According to its sponsors, the Act responds to TikTok’s ultimate ownership by ByteDance Ltd., a company with Chinese subsidiaries whose employees support various ByteDance businesses, including TikTok. They claim that the Act is not a ban because it offers ByteDance a choice: divest TikTok’s U.S. business or be shut down.”
TikTok added in the complaint, “If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down.”
This should be fun to watch. I say that because while I am not a lawyer, actual lawyers have said that courts tend to side with the US government when it comes to national security issues. So this might be a last roll of the dice by TikTok and ByteDance. And if it fails, we’ll likely see if all their talk of not selling out is just talk or not.
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This entry was posted on May 7, 2024 at 12:33 pm 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.