TikTok is pushing back amid an attempt to block a quick-approaching forced-sale deadline in the U.S. Photo Credit: Solen Feyissa
A little over five months ahead of its scheduled U.S. ban, TikTok is doubling down on arguments against the relevant law – including by maintaining that its ties to China are being misrepresented.
The video-sharing app explored those positions in a detail-oriented reply (about which it penned a concise press-room update) to a late-July brief from the Justice Department. As many know, TikTok has from the outset criticized the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act as an outright ban.
Consequently, with no plans in place to sell the platform in the U.S. as required by the law – TikTok and ByteDance have said in more words that doing so would be logistically impossible – the platform is facing the very real possibility of being forced to shut down in the States early next year.
However, TikTok isn’t sitting idly by while this deadline nears. Instead, the controversial app has launched a public campaign targeting the law and challenged the allegedly unconstitutional measure in court. Regarding the latter push (including a sought injunction), high-stakes oral arguments are scheduled to kick off one month from today, on September 16th.
Enter TikTok’s reply, which will be familiar to those who’ve been tracking the courtroom confrontation even casually.
“The government’s core legal contention—that a monumental speech restriction is subject to mere rational-basis review—flouts decades of settled precedent,” the filing indicates off the bat, proceeding from there to take aim at “the government’s dramatic rewriting of what counts as protected speech.”
“TikTok Inc., a U.S. company,” the text proceeds, “is not stripped of First Amendment protection because it is ultimately owned by ByteDance Ltd., a Cayman-incorporated holding company. Does the government seriously believe, for example, that Politico (owned by a German company) has no First Amendment rights?”
Also covered are the DOJ’s alleged failure to identify any “compelling justification for banning TikTok,” the “plainly wrong” assertion that TikTok’s recommendation engine is based in China (it’s purportedly “in the United States, under Oracle’s protection”), and, perhaps most notably, a counter to the claim that the Chinese government can access Americans’ user data.
“It misstates where sensitive U.S. user data resides—not in China, but in the secure Oracle cloud,” the document reads of the DOJ. “It admits it has no evidence that China has ever accessed U.S. user data.”
Lastly, in terms of brass-tacks takeaways, TikTok has further refuted its classification as controlled by a foreign adversary (pointing to ByteDance’s international ownership structure), doubled down on the position that it doesn’t collect stateside users’ precise location data, and reiterated its existing security-related concessions.
Taken as a whole, the points should compel the court to enjoin the law altogether or at least pause the forced-sale deadline pending proceedings, TikTok’s reply brief drives home in conclusion.
Amid this decidedly important effort to avoid shutting down in the world’s largest economy – and while fending off a separate children’s privacy lawsuit from the DOJ and the FTC – TikTok has hardly let up on music-focused initiatives. As of today, said initiatives include an “in-app experience” promoting Post Malone’s debuting country project, F-1 Trillion.
