TikTok sued to block the law that would force the application to be divested from its Chinese-based parent company ByteDance or be banned from the U.S.,
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the U.S. government, TikTok and ByteDance argued the law, the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversaries Act, violates the First Amendment.
The law gives ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok to a new company that will be allowed to operate it in the U.S., or else the app will be banned from American networks and online application stores. The president can give ByteDance an additional 90 days to sell TikTok if he determines it necessary.
But TikTok argued that “qualified divestiture” is “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally,” and therefore would lead to a shutdown of the app in the U.S., cutting off millions of daily users.
TikTok also called out the law for singling out the app by name. While the law grants the president authority to name other applications that could fall under the same regulations, but TikTok and ByteDance are the only ones specified in the measure.
Even if the sale was “feasible,” Tik Tok argued, the law would be still be “an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” and set a precedent that allows the Congress to “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.”
