In April, the U.S. Senate passed a law that would ban TikTok in the country unless ByteDance sold its operations to a non-Chinese company. As a result, the government has given ByteDance until mid-January to sell its application. Otherwise, TikTok could see its access restricted in the United States.
However, TikTok continues to fight tooth and nail to keep its app active within the country. Last Monday, a panel of three judges from the District of Columbia Court of Appeals heard TikTok’s lawyer, Andrew Pincus, say that we are facing an unconstitutional measure and that it is “unprecedented.”
According to ArsTechnica, Pincus argued that the U.S. government is trying to impose a law that would violate the First Amendment, which defends freedom of speech. However, for the Government, these drastic measures are more than justified.
In response, they argue that TikTok could jeopardize “national security.” The main concern of the United States lies in the data collection that TikTok does from the country’s users. This raises suspicions that the Chinese government could spy on and influence Americans with the content shown on the social network.
However, for Pincus, there is not a single solid piece of evidence to support the arguments of the United States. For now, there is only the FBI’s warning about the “possibility that the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok to threaten the national security” of the American country.
The lawyer also mentions in his allegations two other major Chinese applications, Temu and Shein. For him, if TikTok had to be banned, these should also be banned, as they process more sensitive data than TikTok.
Daniel Tenny, a lawyer representing the government, defends the motivations of Congress, as the data collected by TikTok is “extremely valuable to foreign adversaries who want to compromise the security” of the United States.
