Facing Pressure to Sell, TikTok Compares Company to Politico, Business Insider in New Filing

A federal court ruled against ByteDance, and did not find the new law unconstitutional.
The federal court ruled that TikTok and ByteDance had no First Amendment protections because they were not American entities but instead “foreign organizations operating abroad” or organizations owned by such. Petitioners are now arguing that, by this logic, “a U.S. newspaper that republishes the content of a foreign publication—Reuters, for example … would lack constitutional protection,” skirting the fact that the media companies used as examples are not controlled by foreign adversaries.
“Does the government seriously believe, for example, that Politico (owned by a German company) has no First Amendment rights?” the brief reads. “Surely the American companies that publish Politico, Fortune, and Business Insider do not lose First Amendment protection because they have foreign ownership.”
The law does not ban companies with foreign ownership; instead, it prohibits a “foreign adversary controlled application” from operating in the United States.
TikTok and ByteDance argued that neither the app nor parent company is “domiciled in” China, that the recommendation algorithm resides in the United States and not China, and that user data resides “not in China, but in the secure Oracle cloud.”
The petitioners argue that the government has not shown any proof that data is shared with Beijing and that the act unfairly targets and singles out the TikTok app.