TikTok Sues U.S. Government Over Trump Ban
SAN FRANCISCO — TikTok sued the U.S. authorities on Monday, accusing the Trump administration of depriving it of due course of when President Trump used his emergency financial powers to problem an govt order that can block the app from working within the nation.
The go well with, which was filed within the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, is TikTok’s most direct problem to the White House and escalates an more and more bitter back-and-forth between the favored video app and American officers.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese web firm ByteDance, poses a nationwide safety menace due to its Chinese ties. On Aug. 6, he issued twin govt orders banning transactions with TikTok and the Chinese social media app WeChat inside 45 days. Every week later, he issued a separate govt order giving ByteDance 90 days to divest from its American property and any information that TikTok had gathered within the United States.
“We do not take suing the government lightly; however, we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees,” the corporate stated in its go well with. “Our more than 1,500 employees across the U.S. pour their hearts into building this platform every day,” the corporate stated, noting that it deliberate to rent greater than 10,000 extra employees throughout eight states within the coming years.
Relations between the United States and China have soured in current months over rifts in geopolitics, expertise and commerce. The marketing campaign has been partly provoked by China’s extra assertive posture, but in addition Mr. Trump’s need to persuade voters that he’s powerful on China.
As a part of that, Mr. Trump’s advisers have zeroed in on expertise firms that they are saying are beholden to the Chinese authorities via safety legal guidelines, together with ByteDance, the Chinese telecom tools maker Huawei and the web firm Tencent, the proprietor of WeChat.
Mr. Trump’s first govt order towards TikTok attracts its authorized authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to regulate economic transactions in a national emergency. Past administrations have used it to punish foreign governments, as well as drug kingpins and hackers, but have never used it against a global technology company.
Jason M. Waite, a partner at the law firm Alston & Bird, said courts would probably be reluctant to challenge the president on national security grounds. But if a court does decide to rule against Mr. Trump, that could end up curtailing the powers of the presidency.
“I do think the U.S. should be concerned about having to defend I.E.E.P.A. actions and the impact that could have on the authority of a future president,” Mr. Waite said.
TikTok said in a blog post explaining the grounds for its lawsuit that the Trump administration “failed to follow due process and act in good faith, neither providing evidence that TikTok was an actual threat, nor justification for its punitive actions.” The company also claimed that the purported national security threat identified by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States was based on “outdated news articles” and did not address the documentation provided by TikTok demonstrating the security of user data.
One of the Trump administration’s chief concerns has been the storage of American user data on foreign servers. But in its complaint, TikTok said it had taken “extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data,” which included storing American users’ data outside China on servers in the United States and Singapore. The company said it had also erected “software barriers” that stored U.S. user data separately from the data kept on other products and companies owned by ByteDance.
The company also said many of its top personnel — including its chief executive, general counsel and global chief security officer — were all in the United States and were not subject to Chinese law. And further, content moderation across the TikTok app is led by a team based in the United States, operating independently from China.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit.
The president’s move to ban WeChat, a social media app used widely by people of Chinese descent in the United States, is also facing legal challenges. On Friday, a nonprofit group calling itself the WeChat Users Alliance filed a separate suit in a federal court in San Francisco arguing that the president’s attempt to ban WeChat violated various constitutional protections, including the First Amendment, and seeking an injunction against the move.
The executive orders against TikTok have led ByteDance to explore a sale of the popular video app, which is used by millions of teenagers and influencers. The company is in talks with multiple American firms, including Microsoft and Oracle, for a sale of at least parts of its business. TikTok is continuing to negotiate a potential sale while it fights the U.S. government in court.
Such a deal would require the company to move American user accounts over to the acquirer’s servers, a stipulation required by the White House. Microsoft is largely seen as the front-runner in the negotiations.
Another Chinese tech company that the Trump administration has targeted as part of its clampdown is Huawei, the giant maker of smartphones and telecommunications equipment. Huawei has also tried to use the American legal system to push back, though not always successfully.
Huawei also sued the Federal Communications Commission late last year after the agency barred American mobile carriers from using government subsidies to buy the company’s gear. That case is still being heard.
Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco, and Ana Swanson from Washington. Raymond Zhong contributed reporting from Taipei, Taiwan.
