TikTok Inc. and its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd. on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government seeking to block a law that could lead to a nationwide ban on the popular short-form video-sharing platform.
The companies claimed the law signed by President Joe Biden last month is groundlessly singling out the social media platform as a national security threat and is "unconstitutional" as it could trample the free speech rights of 170 million American TikTok users.
"If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down," they said in their petition filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
"For TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content -- an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution's commitment to both free speech and individual liberty," they said.
The law, which came into effect with bipartisan support, requires ByteDance to divest from the app within one year or face a ban in the United States.
The petition said it is "not commercially, technologically or legally feasible" for the parent company to shut down TikTok's U.S. operations within the period.
TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users around the world, and ByteDance have consistently denied that they have ever allowed the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party access to information of U.S. users.
U.S. officials and lawmakers remain concerned that ByteDance could give access to Chinese authorities, given that the Asian country's national security laws require companies to cooperate with intelligence gathering.
China has reacted harshly to the development, arguing that the United States has not shown evidence of TikTok posing a national security threat and accusing Washington of disrupting the company's normal business operations.
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