Trump Administration to face a Lawsuit over banning TikTok in the US
US President Donald Trump’s administration will reportedly see a lawsuit from TikTok. The famous social media platform is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance. It will reportedly file a lawsuit against the administration of Donald Trump after the president signed an executive order effectively banning the app in the US in 45 days. The lawsuit was first reported by NPR and it could be filed against the White House as early as Tuesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The supposed lawsuit follows an executive order Trump signed on Thursday outlawing any transaction between a US citizen and ByteDance. The app has rapidly become one of the most famous platforms for Generation Z in the US, but the executive order was signed to crush TikTok.
The news outlet also said the lawsuit would claim that Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional and baseless. One source informed NPR that the president’s ruling was based on pure speculation and conjecture with no findings of fact. The president has railed against TikTok in recent months and claimed the app was collecting user data on millions of Americans and sending it back to the Chinese government. Moreover, its parent company says all US user data has been stored on servers in the United States and doesn’t leave the country. Trump’s attacks on TikTok came at a time when the White House has ramped up its criticism of China and blamed for the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
TikTok is one of the most other social networks that are collecting data about its users and moderates what’s posted. It grabs people’s locations and messages they send one another and tracks what people watch in order to know what kinds of videos they like and how best to target ads to them. US-based platforms do much the same thing, so deleting TikTok but leaving Snapchat, might not change things much. Most experts believe that if the Chinese government wants information, it will get it. Trump administration has also cracked down on Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE due to the national security issues. These companies have denied they facilitate spying.