{"id":636,"date":"2024-05-07T18:06:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T18:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/tiktok-sues-to-overturn-u-s-law-forcing-sale-or-national-ban\/"},"modified":"2024-05-17T15:55:48","modified_gmt":"2024-05-17T15:55:48","slug":"tiktok-sues-to-overturn-u-s-law-forcing-sale-or-national-ban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/tiktok-sues-to-overturn-u-s-law-forcing-sale-or-national-ban\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok Sues to Overturn U.S. Law Forcing Sale or National Ban"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

TikTok and parent company ByteDance have filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning recently-passed legislation requiring the Chinese company to sell the popular app or face a national ban, arguing that it violates the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

In a complaint filed Tuesday in D.C. federal court<\/a>, TikTok and Byte Dance called the law an \u201cunprecedented\u201d and unconstitutional action aimed at \u201csingling out\u201d one company and \u201csilencing\u201d more than 170 million Americans who use TikTok.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban,\u201d lawyers<\/a> for the two companies wrote. \u201cThere are good reasons why Congress has never before enacted a law like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit came just week after President Joe Biden<\/strong> signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which requires that ByteDance either divest ownership of TikTok by Jan. 19 or face a national ban on the app. Proponents have argued that TikTok presents a national security threat because of its connections to the Chinese government and access to millions of Americans.<\/p>\n

In Tuesday\u2019s complaint, TikTok argued that such national security concerns were not sufficient to override the First Amendment\u2019s protections for free speech. The company\u2019s attorneys said lawmakers had failed to \u201carticulate any threat posed by TikTok\u201d and had cited only \u201cspeculative concerns,\u201d meaning they were making an \u201cextraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power\u201d without clear reason.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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,\u201d TikTok\u2019s lawyers wrote.<\/p>\n

The new lawsuit came just days after TikTok \u2013 an increasingly influential part of the music industry ecosystem \u2013 reached an agreement with Universal Music Group to end a months-long standoff over rights to the music giant\u2019s catalog.<\/p>\n

In the new complaint, TikTok argued that it had already spent billions of dollars addressing the potential security risks cited by lawmakers, and had reached voluntary agreements with executive agencies like the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to safeguard user data and the integrity against foreign government influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongress tossed this tailored agreement aside, in favor of the politically expedient and punitive approach of targeting for disfavor one publisher and speaker,\u201d TikTok\u2019s attorneys wrote. \u201cCongress must abide by the dictates of the Constitution even when it claims to be protecting against national security risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

TikTok has already had success in court over U.S. efforts to ban the app. Citing the First Amendment, a federal judge in 2020 blocked former President Donald J. Trump<\/strong> from carrying out an executive order barring TikTok from app stores. And last year, a federal judge in Montana overturned a law in that state banning the app, ruling that legislation not only violated free speech, but also encroached on federal authority to regulate foreign relations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TikTok and parent company ByteDance have filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning recently-passed legislation requiring the Chinese company to sell the popular app or face a national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[524,943,153,477,942,269,479,182,272],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-ban","tag-forcing","tag-law","tag-national","tag-overturn","tag-sale","tag-sues","tag-tiktok","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":821,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions\/821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}