Social media giant TikTok is planning to sue the Trump administration to counter the executive order issued by President Trump, which bans the service from operating in US.
TikTok is set to file the federal lawsuit as soon as this coming Tuesday according to an NPR report. The law suit will be filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, which is where TikTok’s American operations are headquartered.
The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s action against the firm is unconstitutional because it failed to give the company a chance to respond.
It also alleges that the administration’s national security justification for the order is baseless. “It’s based on pure speculation and conjecture,” an inside source said to NPR. “The order has no findings of fact, just reiterates rhetoric about China that has been kicking around.”
White House spokesman Judd Deere, said, “The Administration is committed to protecting the American people from all cyber-related threats to critical infrastructure, public health and safety, and our economic and national security.”
TikTok said in a statement, “We will pursue all remedies available to us in order to ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and our users are treated fairly – if not by the Administration, then by the US courts.”
The US government has religiously warned its citizen against using TikTok, alleging the Chinese-based firm would likely share US-based user data to the Chinese Communist Party as legally mandated of every company operating in the country.
President Trump issued an executive order banning any and all transactions with TikTok parent company, ByteDance, in 45 days.
The order reads, “TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.”
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” it adds.
TikTok has repeatedly disputed these claims, and says it “has never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request.”
TikTok has become very popular in the past few months as people across the world look for different forms of entertainment while in quarantine. A number of American companies have expressed their interest in buying the social media giant’s US operations. Microsoft and Google are prominent among them. Facebook has recently launched its own version of the video-share app dubbed “Reels.”
