TikTok Sues U.S. Over Divest-or-Ban Law ⇥ politico.com

Rebecca Kern, Politico:

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance sued Tuesday to challenge a law President Joe Biden signed to force the sale or ban of the video sharing app.

The petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit claims the law violates the First Amendment rights of its 170 million American users. It says the law shuts down the platform based on “speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation.”

Nilay Patel on Threads:

This TikTok complaint is startlingly weak on first read — it basically handwaves through “a sale is impossible, let’s just assume it’s a ban” and begins the First Amendment argument from there

TikTok frames a jettisoning from ByteDance as something which would treat the United States as its own distinct company but, surely, an alternative interpretation of the U.S.’ intent is for the entire TikTok enterprise worldwide to be distinct from ByteDance.

Either way, there is plenty of confirmation in the suit from TikTok that its draft agreement with CFIUS includes all sorts of extraordinary stipulations. Why the two parties could not be satisfied with signatures on that document is a great question. TikTok, for its part, alleges the problems are with the U.S. government, and it says it is preemptively implementing several parts of the draft.