TikTok sued the US government today over a law that bans the popular social media app unless it’s sold to an American company.Parent company ByteDance says it will not sell, which leaves it with one option: the courts.The case, filed today in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, says the ban—which was bundled into a larger foreign aid package and signed by President Biden last month—is an “unprecedented step” and “so obviously unconstitutional” because it violates free speech and the First Amendment. “There is no question: the [law] 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 suit says.Given that ByteDance is based in China, the US government argues that TikTok could give the Chinese government a direct way to influence Americans, some of whom are borderline addicted to the app, and collect vast amounts of private data. Hypothetical national security concerns are not enough to ban the app, the suit says, and calls on the US government to prove why it is warranted. “Congress has never before crafted a two-tiered speech regime with one set of rules for one named platform, and another set of rules for everyone else,” it says.The lawsuit will likely delay the ban years beyond the proposed January 2025 cutoff, NBC News reports. TikTok hopes to win the case, as it maintains that selling itself to a new owner is “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.”
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It could be successful. An assistant law professor at Cornell University, Gautam Hans, tells NBC News that without naming “what exactly the risks are, it’s difficult to determine why the courts should validate such an unprecedented law.” However, given the “bipartisan nature of this federal law,” the judges may uphold the bill and support Congress’ determination that TikTok poses a significant national security risk.A smaller-scale ban has already faced constitutional challenges in Montana, however. In December, US District Judge Donald Molloy issued a preliminary injunction to block a ban that was set to go into effect there on Jan. 1, 2024, stating that the law “oversteps state power” and violates the Constitution in several ways.
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