After President Donald Trump announced a sweeping but vague ban on dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and messaging app WeChat, Tik Tok and its US employees are now planning to the Trump administration to court. 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’s orders came in last week on the grounds that these apps are a threat to US national security, foreign policy, and the economy. The TikTok order would take effect in September, but it remains unclear what it will mean for the apps’ 100 million U.S. users, many of them teenagers or young adults who use it to post and watch short-form videos.
According to Godwin employees realise that their jobs are in danger as it is unclear if the order will make it illegal for TikTok to pay its roughly 1,500 workers in the U.S. The order would prohibit “any transaction by any person” with TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Tik Tok’s statement on Friday, 14 August expressed its shock over the executive order which was issued without any due process. The company spent nearly a year trying to engage in “good faith” with the U.S. government to address its concerns.
“What we encountered instead was that the Administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going 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 raise money for attorneys who can “fight this unconstitutional taking.” “This is unprecedented,” Ryan wrote.
