Chinese-owned tech firm TikTok announced it is suing the Trump administration in federal court on Monday, following an executive order from President Trump and ahead of a possible ban over national security concerns in the United States.
“Today we are filing a complaint in federal court challenging the Administration’s efforts to ban TikTok in the U.S.,” TikTok announced in a blog post. “We strongly disagree with the Administration’s position that TikTok is a national security threat … The Administration ignored the great lengths that TikTok has gone to in order to demonstrate our commitment to serving the U.S. market.”
Trump issued executive orders this month that put the popular video-sharing social media app, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, on a path to being banned in the U.S.
TikTok focused much of its attention on an Aug. 6 executive order issued by Trump, claiming the action “has the potential to strip the rights” of TikTok users “without any evidence to justify such an extreme action, and without any due process.” The group claimed that the order “authorizes the prohibition of activities that have not been found to be an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
Trump’s Aug. 6 executive order said that “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” would be prohibited “with ByteDance … or its subsidiaries” within 45 days. The president claimed that TikTok’s data collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
TikTok also touched on Trump’s follow-up executive order on Aug. 14, which was backed up by a ruling by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, finding that TikTok did indeed pose a national security threat. The Chinese firm discussed the “nearly year-long effort we made in good faith” to provide CFIUS with “voluminous information requested,” which it claims was “disregarded” by CFIUS and lamented that CFIUS “rushed out its decision within five minutes of its deadline.”
ByteDance bought Musical.ly, a similar video app, for almost $1 billion in 2017, and Musical.ly and TikTok merged in 2018. Trump’s second executive order stated that “there is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance Ltd. … through acquiring all interests in Musical.ly … might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” The president said that transaction is therefore prohibited, as is ByteDance’s ownership (and the ownership of its Chinese stakeholders) of Musical.ly in the U.S.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, the chairman of CFIUS (which includes the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, energy, and homeland security, the attorney general, and others), also said that “CFIUS conducted an exhaustive review of the case and unanimously recommended this action to the President in order to protect U.S. users from exploitation of their personal data.”
“We far prefer constructive dialogue over litigation,” TikTok said Monday. “But with the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our US operations — eliminating the creation of 10,000 American jobs and irreparably harming the millions of Americans who turn to this app for entertainment, connection, and legitimate livelihoods that are vital especially during the pandemic — we simply have no choice.”
John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the National Security Division, discussed Trump’s Aug. 6 executive order, saying that “once you start looking at that from a national security perspective, and thinking about the data that the phone and the apps are collecting on you, it’s a very different matter if a country with very different values from our own,” such as China, “is collecting all that data.” He said the Chinese government uses this data to build artificial intelligence and to “mine” the data to co-opt potential intelligence targets, which he called a major counterintelligence concern. He also noted that “Uighurs, Hong Kong protests, Tibet, Taiwan, all those issues — there are many reports of the content being censored from a foreign influence perspective.”
Demers added: “Those are the national security risks associated with TikTok. What’s interesting about TikTok is you have an instance of Americans voluntarily signing on to this product as opposed to the Chinese stealing the data.”
Microsoft is exploring the purchase of U.S. operations for TikTok, but any purchase must pass a CFIUS national security review.
ByteDance and TikTok have repeatedly claimed they would never turn over TikTok user data to the Chinese government, but national security experts have raised concerns about China’s own 2017 national intelligence law, which requires Chinese companies to assist Chinese intelligence services.
While some critics believe the president is targeting TikTok because some TikTok users claimed to have inflated the expected attendance at Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, the Chinese app was on the radar of the U.S. government long before.
The Pentagon banned service members from using TikTok in late 2019, and the Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department also banned TikTok on government devices. The House and the Senate voted to block federal employees from using TikTok, and former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign told staff to delete TikTok.
