An executive order signed by the president could be counting down TikTok’s last days in America
TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., has reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
The app is used by pre-teens, teens, and even parents to produce and share 15-second or 60-second videos with content that includes lip-syncing, dancing, singing, and comedy. TikTok has been downloaded over two billion times from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The president’s executive order could block U.S. companies from advertising on TikTok and force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app storefronts. And the app’s 1,000 U.S. employees could have their paychecks frozen. Landlords who own property rented or leased by TikTok could be forced to evict them from the property. Trump’s order could also stop TikTok from using U.S. lawyers to represent it.
According to someone familiar with TikTok’s internal discussions, the company has been arguing that Trump’s executive order was rushed and did not include a way for it to maintain legal representation. The company plans to argue in a courtroom that this violates its due process rights. According to one person familiar with government investigations, if TikTok was being targeted by the Feds, it would have received a subpoena and had a confidential meeting with the White House. Instead, TikTok appeared to be blindsided by the executive order.
