We’ve all heard the news. The United States is falling behind in recovering from a global pandemic, while racism and violence are staring us in the face. People are also struggling to pay their bills, but what does the President do? Bans TikTok. A social media platform primarily used by Gen Z (and brave Millennials). Well, as of Monday morning this week, TikTok is striking back and suing the Trump administration.
On August 6th an executive order was made, giving the company until September 20th to address concerns over the company selling information to the Chinese government. The Trump administration claimed their fears were that the app would, “allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
In a blog post that TikTok posted on Monday, they stated that the Executive Office ignored efforts they made to reassure them that while information was being stored, it was not being sold.
Part of their statement reads, “We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our 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”.
They go on to say that the Trump administration also failed to use due process of law and that by banning the app, the government is violating the Fifth Amendment, our freedom of speech. Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to move forward with this ban. However, that requires an “unusual threat” and there has been no concrete evidence to support this claim. This act has been used in the past for situations that involve terrorism. Who would have thought a social media app would be up for comparison as a threat in the President’s eyes?
