US judge grants TikTok a reprieve, says Donald Trump likely overstepped his authority
- ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, will likely succeed in proving the US government violated the First Amendment, judge says
- The move likely overstepped the president’s legal authority by blocking an information channel, according to judge
In an opinion unsealed on Monday, US District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington said ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, would likely succeed in proving the US government violated the First Amendment and failed to provide the Chinese app with proper due process .
“TikTok (like a news wire, which is expressly identified in IEEPA’s carveout) is primarily a conduit of ‘informational materials’,” Nichols said.
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Global expansion of TikTok and other Chinese tech companies is likely, only not in the West
The TikTok ban will also “inflict irreparable economic and reputational harm” to the company, Nichols said.
By temporarily blocking the ban, the ruling on Sunday prevented the ban of the app from the US stores that was set to go into effect that night.
US Commerce Department defends Trump’s TikTok ban after new court ruling
“The [executive order] is fully consistent with the law and promotes legitimate national security interests,” the US Commerce Department said in a statement.
The parties would need to confer by Wednesday on next steps in the dispute.
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According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese intelligence and economic espionage presents “the greatest long-term threat to US national security and economic security”, as stated the filing.
The document, however, fell short of explaining how TikTok presented as a national security, beyond the fact that TikTok founder Zhang Yiming was listed as “top 100 outstanding private entrepreneurs” in the country and parent company ByteDance has more than 130 Chinese Communist Party members in its Beijing office, according to news reports.
“The Commerce Department does not identify anything specially sensitive about TikTok’s users or the data collected,” said Aimen Mir, former counsel of national security at the Department of Justice and now a lawyer at Freshfields in Washington.
Instead, it “appears to rely on an argument that is a combination of a privacy argument and an argument that all data has national security sensitivity in the context of China”.
Inside China Tech: Is that TikTok deal happening or not?
The legal back and forth took place as parent company ByteDance sought government approval for its proposed deal with Oracle and Walmart for its US operations.
