May 7, 2024
Today at
20:51
The video app TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance have filed a lawsuit in the US against a new law that requires the sale of its American activities by January.
As expected, Tiktok’s Chinese owner has gone to court in the US to challenge the law. Tiktok’s lawyers call it nonsense that there would be a choice between sale or closure, ‘because the deadline for a sale by January 19, 2025 is commercially, technologically and legally unfeasible’.
Tiktok calls the law an infringement on the free expression of the 170 million American users of the video app. In the criminal complaint, Tiktok states that the excessive punishment is also an unconstitutional infringement against the company itself, that it does not receive equal protection under American law, as prescribed, and that there is even expropriation.
Geopolitical tension
The legal battle is a result of the increasing geopolitical tension between superpowers America and China. Many Western countries are concerned that Chinese authorities are abusing TikTok to obtain data from users. For this reason, civil servants in the US and the European Commission, among others, are subject to a TikTok ban on their work phones. In Belgium, TikTok is banned on work phones of federal ministers and civil servants.
The Chinese government, in turn, banned most American-made online services, such as Facebook, Google and YouTube, years ago. There is little chance that Beijing will allow a sale without resistance, because the company’s successful algorithms and data would fall into American hands. The content on TikTok in China differs day and night from ours. In China it is mainly used as an educational tool, while in our country TikTok is a turbo product of quick entertainment via social media.
