On Tuesday, TikTok, together with its parent company ByteDance, took legal action in the US federal court to challenge a new law endorsed by President Joe Biden.
This legislation mandates that ByteDance either sell TikTok by January 19 or cease its operations in the US. The suit, filed in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, claims that the law infringes on several constitutional grounds, particularly violating the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
TikTok, immensely popular among 170 million Americans, faces an existential threat under this law, enacted on April 24. The filing emphatically states that divestiture is unfeasible — “not commercially, not technologically, not legally.” It warns of an inevitable shutdown, which would “silence the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”
