TikTok, the besieged video-sharing app, is taking the U.S. government to court over President Trump’s decision to issue an executive order that bans the app after September 20. On Monday, the company’s lawyers filed a lawsuit, alleging that the U.S. government issued the order in an overly broad claim of the president’s national-security powers.
Of course, all of this might be moot if TikTok — which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company — is acquired by American investors. The app has faced bipartisan criticism in recent months, as people have worried that it might give Americans’ data to the Chinese Communist Party. All of this came to the fore late last month when Trump abruptly promised to ban the app. He quickly backtracked, leaving room for ByteDance to sell the app to an American company, such as Microsoft, Oracle, or Twitter. On August 6, he issued an executive order laying the groundwork for a ban set to take effect next month. The order prevents U.S. entities from doing business with ByteDance — this is the essence of a “ban” on TikTok. What this means in practice will only become clear once the Trump administration decides how to enforce it. At the very least, this will force Apple and Google to remove the app from their online stores, but enforcement could go a lot farther than that.
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