Tik Tok May Now Fight Its Battle In U-S Courts

TikTok CEO Shou Chew’s attempts to win over Congressional lawmakers Thursday failed. But the more crucial fight to prevent the short-video app from being punished or banned is likely to play out in the US legal system, reports Bloomberg.

Lawmakers took turns battering Chew with inquiries for more than four grueling hours, repeatedly and often stridently questioning TikTok’s ownership by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. and asking about China’s ability to access the data of millions of Americans. Chew did little to alleviate those concerns, experts who watched the proceedings said. At one point, asked if ByteDance’s Chinese engineers have access to the data of American users, he said: “It’s a complex subject.”

That places TikTok’s parent in a tougher spot. TikTok executives had internally discussed splitting from ByteDance, but China this week said it would firmly oppose a forced sale. That echoed opposition years ago toward letting even a dash of ByteDance’s secret sauce — its content-recommendation software — end up in foreign hands.

Yet TikTok need not have bothered. It’s unlikely there would be a long list of buyers wealthy or willing enough to take on a US political hot potato worth $50 billion, at a time of escalating US-Chinese tensions and growing scrutiny of large technology platforms, said Caitlin Chin, fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

 

That means the government would have to silence TikTok in the US if it wants to make good on its threats — and judges have in the past shown extreme reluctance to squash even a Chinese-owned social media platform, fearing the precedent it would have on freedom of speech. In 2020, TikTok successfully challenged the Trump administration’s attempt to block the video phenom, ultimately dissipating that first US attempt to exert influence over ByteDance’s greatest creation.

“I do think that Tiktok has a very strong case just because the First Amendment and the legal norms under the First Amendment are so strong that the government has to show that any limitation on speech is narrowly tailored and that it advances a compelling government interest,” Chin said. As for the hearing, “I was not expecting it to be that brutal to watch. Right from the start, we knew that lawmakers were coming in with their minds already made up.”

The American public remains divided on whether TikTok is just a place to watch goofy teens dance and lip-synch to pop music, or a portal through which Beijing might touch the lives of 150 million-plus users. The latter concern is underscored by the fact that Chinese laws give the government power to request data from internet companies on demand, if deemed in the interests of national security.