TikTok and its own 1,500 US employees get set to challenge Trump administration's iphone app ban
TikTok and its own US employees are preparing to take President Donald Trump’s administration to court over his sweeping order to ban the popular video app, according to a lawyer preparing among the lawsuits.
The employees’ legal challenge to Trump’s executive order will be separate from a pending lawsuit from the company that owns the app, though both will argue that the order is unconstitutional, said Mike Godwin, an internet policy lawyer representing the employees.
Trump last week ordered sweeping but vague bans on dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and messaging iphone app WeChat, saying they certainly are a threat to US national security, foreign policy and the economy. The TikTok order would take effect in September, nonetheless it remains unclear what it will mean for the apps’ 100 million US users, many of them teenagers or young adults who utilize it to post watching short-form videos.
It’s also unclear if it'll make it illegitimate for TikTok to pay its roughly 1,500 staff in the US, which is why some of them found Godwin for help, he said. The order would prohibit “any transaction by any person” with TikTok and its own Chinese parent company ByteDance.
“Employees properly recognise that their jobs are in peril and their payment is in peril at this time,” Godwin said.
TikTok said in a statement the other day that it had been “shocked by the recent Executive Order, which was issued without the due process.” It declined to comment Thursday on whether it's pursuing its own lawsuit.
“We've no involvement with and so are not coordinating on” the employee-led initiative, said TikTok spokeswoman Hilary McQuaide said via email. “We respect the rights of employees to engage in concerted activity to get due procedure for law.”
The Fifth and 14th Amendments to the united states Constitution safeguard life, liberty and property from arbitrary government action lacking “due procedure for law.”
Microsoft is in foretells buy elements of TikTok, in a potential sale that’s being forced under Trump’s risk of a ban.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s TikTok and WeChat orders Thursday, telling reporters he was exercising his emergency authority under a 1977 law enabling the president to modify international commerce to handle unusual threats.
“The administration is focused on protecting the American persons from all cyber threats and these software collect significant amounts of private data on users,” said McEnany, adding that the Chinese government can access and use such data.
TikTok said it spent practically a year trying to engage in “good faith” with the US government to handle these concerns.
“What we encountered instead was that the Administration paid no focus on facts, dictated conditions of an agreement without going right through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses,” the company’s statement said.
Godwin said he was retained by Patrick Ryan, who joined TikTok from Google earlier this year as a technical program manager. Ryan posted a public fundraising pitch on GoFundMe this week to improve money for attorneys who can “fight this unconstitutional taking.”
“That is unprecedented,” Ryan wrote. “And it’s frankly really uncool.”
Unlike other Chinese tech companies targeted by Trump, such as for example telecom giant Huawei, TikTok’s widespread popularity among Americans adds a layer of complexity to its legal and political challenges. The looming ban has annoyed TikTok users, many of them Trump supporters like Pam Graef of Metairie, Louisiana.
The 53-year-old fitness instructor found nearly instant TikTok fame after downloading the iphone app this summer and posting a video of herself dancing frenetically in a kitchen as someone pretending to be her embarrassed daughter shouts that she’s doing it wrong. The video has practically 3.5 million views.
“I don’t want to buy to be banned. It’s simply a blast,” Graef said. “It’s a means for me to promote my virtual training and virtual classes.”
She said Trump won’t lose her vote over this, but she doesn’t understand all the fuss about the app’s Chinese ownership. “What are they gaining by spying on us?” Graef said. “We’re just doing stupid videos and having fun.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that, until late this past year, the TikTok app could track users of Android phones without their consent by collecting unique phone identifiers in a way that skirted privacy safeguards set by Google. TikTok responded that the technique it used is a common way to prevent fraud and said it no more collects the unique identifier.
The business has repeatedly said that just how it collects data is typical for a large number of mobile apps. “We've clarified that TikTok hasn't shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request,” said its statement last week.
Trump’s actions follow the lead of India, which includes expressed similar security concerns and earlier come early july banned TikTok and a large number of other Chinese software amid a military standoff between the two countries.
Godwin said the employees’ legal challenge will be focused on worker rights, not on the national security claims underlying Trump’s order.
The civil rights lawyer, known in early internet culture for coining “Godwin’s law,” which posits that online debates will eventually devolve into the utilization of Nazi analogies, said employees can’t afford to wait.
“We must proceed rapidly,” he said Thursday. “If we hold out for the order to be enforced, which it'll be on September 20, then your workers will eventually lose their chances to be paid.”
