TikTok staff raise more than US$11,600 in a day for injunction against Trump’s ‘uncool’ executive order

US President Donald Trump’s executive order last week targeting TikTok would prevent TikTok from paying its employees, according to a crowdfunding campaign

The campaign, raising funds for employees to file an injunction against the order, hit more than a third of its US$30,000 goal in a day

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TikTok employees plan to file an injunction against US President Donald Trump’s executive order to ensure the company can still pay employees. Photo: Reuters

Published: 1:55pm, 14 Aug 2020Updated: 8:59am, 15 Aug 2020

A crowdfunding campaign to help US employees of embattled short video app TikTok “fight to keep our paychecks”, after US President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting the Chinese-owned app, has raised more than a third of its US$30,000 target in a day.

The order prohibits “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” with TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance starting next month. The document calls on the Secretary of Commerce to define the specific banned transactions, although this has yet to happen.

California-based TikTok technical program manager Patrick Ryan, who organised the GoFundMe fundraiser, wrote on the campaign page that making “any transaction by any person” with ByteDance illegal would cause 1,500 ByteDance and TikTok employees in the US to lose their paychecks from September 20.

The employees plan to file an injunction “so that a court can order the government to change the order so that TikTok can still pay employees”, according to the campaign page. “We are asking only for the right to continue to receive paychecks, not for anything else: no damages or any other payout.”

The campaign, initiated on Thursday, had already raised more than US$11,600 from some 40 donors as of noon on Friday.

Separately, the company has also indicated that it may take its objections over the executive order to court. “We will pursue all remedies available to us in order to ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and our users are treated fairly – if not by the Administration, then by the US courts,” TikTok said in a statement on its website last week.