TikTok knows that it has great strength. It has more than 170 million users in the United States and they do not plan to throw in the towel, despite accusations of being a threat to national security as a tool of Chinese espionage.
So this platform filed a lawsuit this Tuesday in the Washington courts against the US government with the clear objective of stopping the application of the regulation approved last month in Congress, whose objective is that ByteDance, Chinese owners of this application, sell it in the coming months or its use will be banned.
The lawsuit claims that the so-called “Protecting Americans from Adversarial Apps Controlled Act” violates the constitutional mandate that protects free speech. Specifically, he describes it as an “unprecedented violation” of the first amendment. The president signed that law on April 24.
“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single platform to a permanent nationwide ban,” the document states. This rule “prohibits Americans from participating in a single online community that has more than 1 billion followers in the world,” TikTok insists. The support showed a rare confluence of legislators from both parties.
The company argues that invoking a national security concern is not a sufficient reason to restrict free speech. And it places the burden on the federal government to prove that this restriction is justified. That proof, the document insists, has not been achieved.
