TikTok’s big day in court is here: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty ImagesHere’s a roundup of all the news about a new law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell off its platform. Continue reading…
Fransebas
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25336775/STK051_TIKTOKBAN_CVirginia_D.jpg)
President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 24th that would ban TikTok, the shortform video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, if the company doesn’t sell the platform off within a year. ByteDance has nine months from that date to divest itself from the app, with a potential three-month extension if the president is satisfied with its progress. On May 7th, TikTok sued the government over the potential ban, calling the law unconstitutional and claiming it “subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
Discussions about banning TikTok have seen politicians in the US and internationally accuse it of being a tool for propaganda and a security risk. Attempts to force a sale of TikTok first began under the Trump administration before culminating in the successful late-April legislative push.
Prior to the law’s signing, a slew of TikTok bans across the US barred the app from devices tied to universities and government hardware at the state, local, and federal levels.
While some experts say there’s no evidence the app has done any more damage or risked user privacy beyond what we’ve seen from companies like Facebook or Google, politicians nevertheless successfully passed a measure to ban TikTok entirely if they can’t force a separation from ByteDance.
Read on for all the latest news on a potential TikTok ban in the US.
“Do you have a First Amendment interest in who owns TikTok?”
TikTok’s lawyer is off the stage, and Judge Noemi Rao is questioning Jeffrey Fisher, who represents a lawsuit from users of TikTok. Fisher’s argument so far centers on the claim that American media creators have a right to work with publishers of their choosing. Rao is questioning how far that right should stretch — emphasizing the judges’ focus on TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
TikTok’s lawyer hints at the government’s secret evidence for wanting to ban the app.
Andrew Pincus, the attorney representing TikTok and ByteDance in an appeals court hearing today, didn’t outright mention the DOJ’s attempt to introduce classified evidence. But he did suggest there’s no public rationale for the potential ban.
“We don’t really know what was determined here, because this was Congress enacting statute that has no findings, that doesn’t say why Congress did what it did.”
The TikTok ban hearing is streaming on YouTube.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has just started its morning session, where TikTok and the US Government will be fighting over the divest-or-ban law passed earlier this year. There’s one brief argument in another case before it starts.
TikTok is about to get its day in court
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
Next week, a court will hear arguments about whether the US government can ban TikTok, based on evidence it doesn’t want anyone — including the social media company — to see.
On September 16th, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments for TikTok v. Garland, TikTok’s First Amendment challenge to legislation that it claims amounts to a ban. It’s a fight not just about free speech but whether the Department of Justice can make a case using classified material that its opponent can’t review or argue against. The government argues TikTok is a clear national security threat but says that revealing why would be a threat, too.
DOJ is trying to convince a court to let it file classified evidence that TikTok’s lawyers can’t see.
In a new filing, DOJ says it’s “not trying to litigate in secret,” but that the court should be able to review classified information that led Congress to determine the divest-or-ban bill was necessary. In its own filing, TikTok says the government’s arguments for the bill are riddled with errors and omissions.
The DOJ enters its defense of the TikTok ban-or-divest law.
A month after TikTok made its First Amendment case against a potential ban, lawyers for the government responded Friday. The partially redacted filings (available in full here) include their arguments that the Chinese government could use data collected by the app or manipulate its algorithm to influence US elections.
One example pointed to search tools for the company’s internal Lark messaging tool, shown below.
Donald Trump likes TikTok, not Zuckerberg.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, the former president once again expressed support for the Chinese-owned juggernaut facing a ban in the US:
“Now [that] I’m thinking about it, I’m for TikTok, because you need competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram — and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.”
Bloomberg says he’s still stung by Facebook’s ban after the events on January 6th, 2021. “All of a sudden, I went from number 1 to having nobody,” said Trump, without feeling it necessary to challenge Zuck to a cage fight.
TikTok makes its First Amendment case
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
TikTok says that the government didn’t adequately consider viable alternative options before charging ahead with a law that could ban the platform in the US. TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance is based in China, claims that it provided the US government with an extensive and detailed plan to mitigate national security risks and that this plan was largely ignored when Congress passed a law with a huge impact on speech.
In briefs filed at the DC Circuit Court on Thursday, both TikTok and a group of creators on the platform who’ve filed their own suit spelled out their case for why they believe the new law violates the First Amendment. The court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on September 16th, just a few months before the current divest-or-ban deadline of January 19th, 2025.
TikTok is aware of a ‘potential’ exploit being used to take over brand accounts.
According to Forbes, TikTok accounts for Paris Hilton and CNN have been hijacked recently by a “zero-day” attack in the app’s DMs that could be activated simply by opening the message.
TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek sent us this statement:
Our security team is aware of a potential exploit targeting a number of brand and celebrity accounts. We have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. We’re working directly with affected account owners to restore access, if needed.
TikTok is reportedly splitting its source code to create a US-only algorithm
Illustration: The Verge
A report from Reuters says that work has been ongoing since last year to create a version of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm that operates independently from Douyin, the Chinese version of the app operated by its parent company ByteDance. According to the unnamed sources, completing the project could take more than a year as part of a plan to show lawmakers that the US business is independent of its owner in Beijing.
The report says executives have talked about the project in all-hands meetings and on the company’s internal messaging system, Lark. The sources also said that splitting the source code would cut TikTok off from the “massive engineering development power” of its parent company.
TikTok will have its day in court this fall.
Oral arguments in its case against the federal divest-or-ban bill will be scheduled for this September, according to an order from the DC Circuit Court. That’s just months before the initial January 19th deadline its Chinese owner ByteDance has to sell the app or face a ban. The clock keeps running unless the court says otherwise.
TikTok is suing the US government — can it beat the ban?
On today’s episode of Decoder, Verge editors Alex Heath and Sarah Jeong join me to discuss the lawsuit TikTok filed last week against the US government in response to the divest-or-ban bill.
One reason I wanted to have both Alex and Sarah on here is that there’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law; some of TikTok’s arguments are contradicted by the simple facts of what the company has already promised to do around the world, and some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of attempts to regulate speech and the internet.
TikTok averted a ban once before under the Trump administration. But this time around, the bill is on far more solid footing, and TikTok is arguing that divesting its US business is not possible “commercially, technologically, or legally.” So we walked through each of those arguments one by one.
Eight TikTok creators file their own suit against the divest-or-ban law
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
The suit is similar to the company’s own challenge to the law in that it leans on First Amendment arguments, calls lawmakers’ concerns around the app speculative, and recalls that courts have blocked other methods of banning TikTok, including former President Donald Trump’s executive order and a Montana state law. But while the company’s suit details the alleged impracticality of separating TikTok from its owner ByteDance, the creators’ suit focuses squarely on how their own speech could be impacted if TikTok went away.
TikTok sues the US government over ban
Illustration: The Verge
TikTok is suing the US government over the new law that would force the shortform video app to be divested from its China-based parent company ByteDance or face a ban in the US. In a court filing submitted Tuesday, TikTok says Congress has “taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok” and calls the move “unconstitutional.”
The complaint argues that a sale from ByteDance isn’t possible and that the law would “force a shutdown” by January 19th, 2025.
CBP is interrogating TikTok employees
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
Immigration officers have interrogated more than 30 TikTok employees who traveled to the US, Forbes reports. Some workers at TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, have been pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and held for additional questioning, according to the report. Many of the workers who have been singled out are Chinese nationals.
Some of the people who have been interrogated work in machine learning or data engineering. CBP agents have asked them about their access to US users’ TikTok data. The workers have also been asked about the location of TikTok’s US-based data centers and their own individual involvement with Project Texas, a massive corporate restructuring project designed to wall off US user data from ByteDance’s workers in China.
The legal challenges that lie ahead for TikTok — in both the US and China
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
After failing to stop a bill that could ban TikTok in the US unless it separates from its China-based owner ByteDance, the company now faces two big hurdles: the US judicial system and the Chinese government.
TikTok has promised to bring a legal challenge against the law that was signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday, which requires ByteDance to divest the app within a year or face an effective ban in the US. Experts expect its main arguments to center on alleged violations of its own First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million US users. But it won’t be an easy fight since judges often hesitate to make decisions of national security importance where the legislature has so forcefully weighed in.
What happens to TikTok?
The Verge / Photo by Anadolu, Getty Images
This week’s TikTok news came with a strong feeling of déjà vu. Now, with the Biden administration giving up to a year for the app to be spun off from ByteDance or face a ban from the US, the question is: what happens next?
ByteDance has been clear that it will fight this new law in the courts on First Amendment grounds, which is how it successfully defeated the Trump administration’s 2020 ban attempt. After talking to sources in and around the company, I think spinning off TikTok is the last-resort measure for leadership. CEO Shou Chew and other execs encouraged staff to stay the course during a humdrum all-hands meeting at TikTok’s New York City headquarters earlier this week, according to two people in attendance.
Patreon weighs in on the potential TikTok ban.
The creator subscription platform markets itself as basically the opposite of the algorithm-driven TikTok — but that doesn’t mean Patreon is celebrating the forced divestment from ByteDance.
Banning TikTok just serves to further entrench YouTube and Instagram as the dominant platforms in this industry. But more competition is good for creators–it gives them more leverage and ultimately more control over their businesses.
TikTok doesn’t seem very high on the US / China priority list.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.
Why the TikTok ban won’t solve the US’s online privacy problems.
Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.
This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.
Anyone want to buy TikTok?
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge
It was going to happen, and then it wasn’t going to happen, and then it happened. The United States Congress passed a bill that would either ban TikTok or force it to be sold, and President Joe Biden signed it.
So... what now? TikTok could sue, and win, and go back to normal. TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, could just decide to shut it down and move on. Or it could sell TikTok US. Those are really the only three outcomes, and we have a year or less to figure out which it’s going to be.
Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images
A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform — is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure.
It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday.
The great conundrum of campaigning on TikTok
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
Joe Biden faces the camera, casually dressed for a US president in khaki slacks and a quarter zip. He jovially answers a series of questions about the Super Bowl happening that day: Chiefs or Niners? Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce? And finally: Trump or Biden?
“Are you kidding? Biden,” the president says with a smile.
