The social network TikTok has filed a complaint against the US administration in an attempt to prevent the application of a bill adopted last month, which aims to force the Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the application to avoid its ban in the USA.
The complaint, filed Tuesday before the Washington DC Court of Appeal, claims that the law, adopted at the end of April by Congress, violates freedom of expression, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
“ For the first time in history, Congress has passed a law that permanently bans one platform of expression nationwide, and prohibits every American from participating in any community in single line with more than a billion people worldwide“, the company’s lawyers emphasized in the complaint.
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TikTok believes that national security concerns are not a sufficient reason to restrict free speech and that the burden is on the federal government to prove that such restriction is justified.
The text adopted by Congress requires the Chinese company ByteDance to sell its video sharing application TikTok within twelve months, otherwise the platform would be banned.
The federal government and dozens of states have already banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
The application has nearly 170 million users in the United States.
With MAP
