Popular video app TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the US government on Tuesday. In doing so, they are trying to stop what they consider to be an “unconstitutional” law that forces ByteDance to sell its American parts. If ByteDance does not do this, TikTok could be banned in the United States.
According to ByteDance and TikTok, it is wrongly claimed that there is a choice. Continuing operations in the US “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally,” they say. “There is no doubt about it: 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 unmatched elsewhere.”
And even if selling the American parts is possible, ByteDance and TikTok see this as an “extraordinary and unconstitutional exercise of power”. According to the companies, this would mean that Americans would no longer be connected to the rest of the world via TikTok. “An outcome that is fundamentally contrary to both freedom of expression and individual freedom,” the companies said.
Many Western countries are concerned that Chinese authorities are abusing TikTok to obtain data from users. For this reason, civil servants in the US and the European Commission, among others, are subject to a TikTok ban on their work phones. There is no such ban in the Netherlands, although last year the government called on government officials to remove TikTok from their work phones.
