Trial begins on TikTok ban lawsuit in US on Monday

Lawyers representing social media app TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance are preparing to face the Justice Department on Monday in a case that could decide the app’s fate in the United States.

The case, which will be heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, consolidates several lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a law enacted earlier this year.

The measure, which had broad bipartisan support in Congress, requires ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19, 2025, or be forced to shut down its service within the United States.

Those who disagree with the law say it represents an unconstitutional suppression of free speech that violates the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s roughly 170 million U.S. users.

The Justice Department maintains that TikTok poses a national security threat because it collects personal data of U.S. citizens and that, despite assurances to the contrary, it could be compelled by the Chinese government to provide that data if requested.

The government also says the platform’s recommendation algorithm, which determines what content individual users see, could be manipulated by the Chinese government to shape public opinion in the United States.

The TikTok argument

Congress passed the measure targeting TikTok, known as the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, as part of a sweeping foreign aid bill in April.

The move gave the company 270 days to sell itself or close its U.S. operations. The company immediately protested, claiming the move was a clear violation of the First Amendment.

“Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific forum for expression,” the company said in legal documents. “Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.”

The company also insisted that it is forced to choose between two unsustainable alternatives: a shutdown that leaves the US out of a global network of billions of users would be extremely burdensome to manage from a technological standpoint and would greatly devalue TikTok as an advertising platform, making it impossible for the company to compete with other social networks.

On the other hand, the forced sale of the platform to a non-Chinese company would leave the thousands of Chinese developers who built TikTok and continue to maintain it without the right to continue working on the platform, threatening its continued operation.

The sale would also not include TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, the core of the service’s appeal to users, the sale of which is banned under Chinese law. The company argues that without it, the service would be much less popular.

The creators have their say

Lawyers opposing the ban will appear on behalf of ByteDance and TikTok and more. The case consolidates the company’s complaint with those of several American TikTok users who claim they would suffer irreparable harm if their service was taken away.

Many have amassed huge followings on the platform and have used TikTok to advertise their businesses, monetize their creative output, or broadcast political or other messages to a wide audience.

Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center, filed one of the original cases on behalf of Based Politics, a conservative-libertarian media organization that uses TikTok to reach a wide variety of viewers.

“Our client is an organization that uses TikTok to spread ideas about free markets and individual freedom in particular, and with TikTok they are able to reach an audience of young people with those ideas that they can’t reach anywhere else,” Huebert told the outlet. Voice of America.

“If this TikTok ban is allowed to go into effect, it will end the free speech of all of these people and eliminate our client’s ability to get its message out to the audience it wants to reach, and that is why this case presents a First Amendment free speech issue,” Huebert said.

Another content creator involved in the lawsuit is Brian Firebaugh, a Texas cattle rancher whose @cattleguy account has more than 450,000 followers. Firebaugh has said TikTok generates the vast majority of his sales.

In videos posted to his account, Firebaugh has accused the government of “overreaching” in its efforts against TikTok. He described the movement to block the ban on the app as one of “small business owners and some of TikTok’s biggest creators who are literally fighting for their livelihood.”

The case of the government

In its response to the lawsuit, the Justice Department argued that any violation of TikTok users’ First Amendment rights is overridden by the government’s interest in preserving national security.

“The Chinese government, which views the United States as a geopolitical rival, has broad authority and practical ability to require Chinese companies to secretly assist China in its intelligence, law enforcement, and national security efforts,” the report said.

“Given TikTok’s broad reach within the United States, China’s ability to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching goal of undermining U.S. interests creates a national security threat of immense depth and scale,” it said.

In a first attempt to avoid the law requiring its sale, TikTok had tried to appease the US authorities by launching what it called “Project Texas”.

The $1 billion scheme aimed to sequester the data of all US-based TikTok users on servers maintained in the state of Texas by US tech firm Oracle.

U.S. officials have dismissed the effort as cosmetic and ineffective.

In an addendum to the government’s filing, the Justice Department also alleged that the company has a history of sharing U.S. user data with its Chinese workforce.

In one example, a statement provided by David Newman, a principal assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, wrote that the company has used an internal communications platform called Lark that “collected and stored large amounts of personal data.”

“TikTok employees have communicated with their coworkers at Lark and, at various times, have sent significant amounts of restricted U.S. user data (including, but not limited to, personally identifiable information) to each other via Lark channels to address various operational issues,” the statement said.

“This resulted in certain sensitive US personal data being contained in Lark channels and therefore stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees located in China,” it said.

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