TikTok’s and its parent company, ByteDance, has taken the Trump administration to court over their ban in the United States. The plaintiffs claim that the US government had imposed the rule onto TikTok with no factual grounds, and was instead done on an “anti-China political campaign”.
TikTok argues that “Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine”.
This comes after President Trump had signed an executive order to stop ByteDance from running TikTok in the USA, citing national security concerns – the concerns being claims that ByteDance were spying on American users via the collection of private data such as location, network activity, and browsing history.
TikTok’s law suit looks to prevent the president from abusing his power, saying that Donald Trump has misappropriated the usage of his authority to strengthen his campaign against China as the US elections draw closer. The complaint continues by saying that Trump threatens to destroy an online community where millions of Americans connect and express themselves.
Image credit: Wired UK
However, there is talk about Microsoft buying over the American branch of the platform, meaning the ban would have no impact on its users anyway – only ByteDance who would lose a massive portion of its market share.
It’ll be interesting to see how things play out between the two camps – although we doubt it’ll have much impact on Malaysian users now, we think the results of the law suit will have larger implications on how social media is run and owned in the future, and have a domino effect on the rest of the world.
