TikTok sues US to block law that could ban the social media platform
Associated PressTikTok and its Chinese parent company filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a new American law that would ban the popular video-sharing app in the U.S. unless it’s sold to an approved buyer, saying it unfairly singles out the platform and is an unprecedented attack on free speech. In its lawsuit, ByteDance says the new law vaguely paints its ownership of TikTok as a national security threat in order to circumvent the First Amendment, despite no evidence that the company poses a threat. According to the lawsuit, the Chinese government has “made clear” that it wouldn’t allow ByteDance to include the algorithm that populates users’ feeds and has been the “key to the success of TikTok in the United States.” TikTok and ByteDance say the new law leaves them with no choice but to shut down by next Jan. 19 because continuing to operate in the U.S. wouldn’t be commercially, technologically or legally possible. The suit also paints divestment as a technological impossibility, since the law requires all of TikTok’s millions of lines of software code to be wrested from ByteDance so that there would be no “operational relationship” between the Chinese company and the new U.S. app.