Social-Media
TikTok file a last-minute lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the looming ban
TikTok and the parent company ByteDance filed a complaint late Friday against the Trump administration to attempt to crack the ban on new installs of the software scheduled to take effect on Sunday.
TikTok claims in the complaint that the Trump administration's decision to block new downloads of the software, declared on Friday, violates freedom of expression rights. The administration, which includes the Commerce Department, "taken this unprecedented step to block the common networking and knowledge exchange site without giving its owners ... due process of law and for political reasons rather than any 'unusual and abnormal danger' to the United States," according to the complaint.
It is not the first time that TikTok has claimed that the Trump administration has acted against it without due process. Earlier this year, the administration called for a ban on TikTok on data protection grounds and requested that ByteDance sell TikTok US operations to an American company by 15 September. TikTok filed a suit against President Trump in August, alleging that Trump's initial order did not provide proof that TikTok was a national security threat to the US.
Beijing-based ByteDance has been negotiating with a variety of US businesses in recent weeks on a proposal to set up a new company, TikTok Global, to resolve the security issues of the Trump administration.
Oracle and Walmart are the remaining candidates with a stake in the current TikTok venture.
We have now agreed to extraordinary degree of increased openness and compliance far above what other developers are able to do, including third-party audits, inspection of code protection, and U.S. government monitoring of U.S. data security, TikTok said in a statement on Friday.
The US is TikTok's second-largest market outside China after a ban in India, according to the Sensor Tower analytics website, with an estimate of about 7.6 million installs per month in 2020. TikTok added 247,000 new installations on Friday, a rise of 12 per cent from Thursday, according to data from Sensor Tower.
