TikTok and its Chinese parent, ByteDance Ltd., sued on Monday in federal court in Los Angeles to challenge an Aug. 6 order from President Donald Trump prohibiting U.S. residents from doing business with TikTok. Trump says TikTok is a security risk for user data. The company said the president’s decision was made “for political reasons,” is unconstitutional and violates rights to due process.doesn’t take effect for weeks, it has escalated tensions between the U.S. and China. On Aug.
Those moves included storing data in the U.S. and Singapore, segregating TikTok data from other ByteDance offerings and appointing a U.S. leadership and content moderation team that is “not subject to Chinese law.”Trump’s decision to force the sale of ByteDance’s U.S. assets was based on an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. Decisions by the interagency panel, which is led by the Treasury Department, are all but impossible to overturn in court.
Trump made his move under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law that allows the president to declare a national emergency in response to an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” which authorizes him to block transactions and seize assets., according to James Dempsey, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.