By Ivana Saric | Axios
President Joe Biden signed a bill Wednesday that will force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest from its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban.
Why it matters: The move potentially sets up a protracted legal fight over the fate of the popular social media app, as TikTok has vowed not to go down without a fight.
What’s the concern about TikTok?
The bill signed into law Wednesday has been a long time coming, after the Biden administration warned last year that TikTok could face a ban if its parent company, ByteDance, didn’t sell its stake in the U.S. version of the app.
- TikTok’s critics have long argued the app could put U.S. customer data at risk because Chinese law requires China’s companies to share information with the government.
- TikTok has maintained that it operates independently and protects U.S. data through an alliance with Oracle, which firewalls the data from overseas access.
“The Biden administration’s law requiring Chinese company ByteDance to sell Tik Tok is unconstitutional, unwise, and unsettling.
The law abridges First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. It deprives ByteDance of its property without due process of law in violation of the Fifth Amendment. It may violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
It is unwise because it discourages foreign development of goods and services for our domestic market and significantly erodes barriers to other government seizures of private property.
Most of all, it is unsettling. The law is premised on the idea that our national security is risked by the fact that the Chinese government might require ByteDance to disclose data regarding its American users. The nexus with national security seems strained to me and hardly a compelling justification for such a massive government intrusion upon our rights. The whole point of rights is that they protect us even when it is inconvenient.
Legitimate angst about government spying on American internet users should be focused domestically to address the NSA’s massive, warrantless surveillance, FISA’s secret surveillance, and the Biden administration’s semi-extortionate communications with domestic social media.
We should not casually sacrifice liberty for safety.”
Logan Elia, Rose Law Group Partner, Senior Litigation Attorney
