Short-video sharing platform TikTok filed a complaint in US federal court on Monday challenging the Trump administration's efforts to ban it in the US.
It said in a blog post that the executive order issued by Trump administration on August 6, 2020 has the potential to strip the rights of its community without any evidence to justify such an extreme action, and without any due process.
"We strongly disagree with the Administration's position that TikTok is a national security threat and we have articulated these objections previously," it said, adding "Now is the time for us to act."
TikTok said it does not take suing the government lightly and they have no choice but to take action to protect its rights, and the rights of the community and employees.
"In our complaint we make clear that we believe the Administration ignored our extensive efforts to address its concerns, which we conducted fully and in good faith even as we disagreed with the concerns themselves," the statement read.
The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government. But, as the US government is well aware, Plaintiffs have taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s US user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its US user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products, it said.
These actions were made known to the US government during a recent U.S. national security review of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of a China-based company, Musical.ly. As part of that review, Plaintiffs provided voluminous documentation to the US government documenting TikTok's security practices and made commitments that were more than sufficient to address any conceivable US government privacy or national security concerns, the statement said.
TikTok's full announcement can be found here:
