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August 24, 2020

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TikTok to challenge Trump鈥檚 executive order in a lawsuit

Source: Agencies | 00:00 UTC+8 August 24, 2020 | Print Edition

TIKTOK said it plans to file a lawsuit today against US President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting transactions with the popular short video app and its Chinese parent ByteDance.

“To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and users are treated fairly, we have no choice but to challenge the executive order through the judicial system,” TikTok said in a statement on Saturday.

“Even though we strongly disagree with the administration’s concerns, for nearly a year we have sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution,” it said. “What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.”

TikTok’s owner ByteDance issued a separate statement yesterday saying it will officially file a lawsuit against Trump administration today.

Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with ByteDance. He issued a separate order on August 14 that gave ByteDance 90 days to divest the US operations of TikTok.

ByteDance has been making progress in talks with potential acquirers, including Microsoft Corp and Oracle. Some of ByteDance’s US investors could also join the winning bid. Reports have said Oracle, whose chairman Larry Ellison has raised millions in campaign funds for Trump, was weighing a bid for TikTok’s operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

TikTok has been downloaded 175 million times in the US and more than a billion times around the world. While it is best known for its anodyne videos of people dancing and going viral among teenagers, US officials have expressed concerns that information on users could be passed on to Chinese government.

ByteDance, however, has said it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump’s crackdown as political.

Besides the lawsuit, the company is also preparing for the worst, a shutdown plan to keep its employees in the United States on the payroll, even if the app is shut down in the country.

ByteDance worries that, due to the extremely wide scope and highly uncertain content of the US executive order, the company is unable to ensure that a solution acceptable to all parties can be reached within the time limit set by the US government. Besides the company’s lawsuit, its US employees are also planning to take the Trump administration to court over the executive order.

US measures move away from the long-promoted American ideal of a global, open Internet and could invite other countries to follow suit, analysts said.

“It’s really an attempt to fragment the Internet and the global information society along US and Chinese lines, and shut China out of the information economy,” said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Tech professor and founder of the Internet Governance Project.

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