Attorneys for ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, will argue in front of US lawmakers on Monday that the law forcing its sale is unconstitutional.
Attorneys for the Chinese company behind TikTok and the US government will go head to head on Monday over a law to force the app’s sale.
It’s the latest in an ongoing battle between the US government and TikTok.
On April 23, US lawmakers passed legislation that would force ByteDance to sell Tiktok within nine months or face a country-wide ban.
The US concern is that ByteDance collects user data and shares that with the Chinese government, something TikTok has repeatedly denied, calling it “basic misinformation”.
Less than a week after the Senate passed the bill, ByteDance filed a 70-page appeal with a US court that asks them to review whether the law violates any Constitutional rights of Americans.
Selling TikTok ‘not possible’
“The law … is unconstitutional,” the appeal reads. “Banning TikTok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the Act’s sponsors … depict the law as not a ban at all, but merely a regulation of TikTok’s ownership”.
TikTok, a social media platform that shares short videos, is used by approximately 170 million Americans, with a third of US adults using the platform, according to the Pew Research Centre.
The appeal argues that selling TikTok is not possible “not commercially, not technologically, not legally – and certainly not on the 270-day timeline required by the Act”.
“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere”.
Countries like Australia, Estonia, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark and EU institutions have banned the app from being used on the devices of public servants due to privacy concerns.
Some German MPs raised the discussion of a potential TikTok ban in March for the same reasons, but it’s unclear whether that would be on public devices or for the wider public.
