May 23, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last month saw the Senate approve a measure to force TikTok owners to sell the company or face a ban in the United States. President Biden signed it into law as part of a $95 billion foreign aid package.
“The legislation will give TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, up to a year to sell the app,” wrote Jesse Guynn, a reporter for USA Today in an April 23 article. “If they don’t, it would be banned from U.S. app stores and web hosting.”
This month TikTok is turning the tables, opting to sue the United States government on grounds that the potential ban violates the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As reported on NBC News and elsewhere, the suit calls the law an unprecedented violation of the First Amendment.
“The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., argues that the bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, violates constitutional protections of free speech,” write reporters Angela Yang and Savannah Sellers of NBC News. “The company argues that invoking national security concerns is not a sufficient reason for restricting free speech, and that the burden is on the federal government to prove that this restriction is warranted.”
John Moolenaar, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told NBC News: “Congress and the Executive Branch have concluded, based on both publicly available and classified information, that TikTok poses a grave risk to national security and the American people…I’m confident that our legislation will be upheld.”
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