I will be honest, i am fully against tiktok and everything it stands for. It should burn in hell.

…However, the law the us passed to ban tiktok makes no sense whatsoever. At its core its as bad as china’s grasp on a lot of markets. I believe a more correct way is to ban the practices tik tok does and ban it from federal devices. However, such a law needs more effort and would also get us-based companies in trouble.
But even then, its a way better solution to the problem

Yeah I don’t think ByteDance has a legal ground here.

Also this coming from a Chinese company, is rich.

Will be interesting to read the arguments and hear what experts have to say.

There is some precedence that corporations do have first amendment rights.

A hypothetical argument from TikTok is they think they are allowed constitutional rights, in this case to publish whatever they want, in the act of doing a commercial activity and that the law which was passed to force a sale to a local owner is a violation of their right to speak freely.

I suspect TikTok operates in the USA under an American registered entity that is wholly owned by a foreign entity. Whether that grants or removes any such constitutional rights seems unclear.

Next, it doesn’t seem like the law intends to block TikTok’s “speech”, rather it specifically allows the executive branch to block this particular type of foreign entity from doing business on American soil on the grounds of security, enforced most likely by blocking it from doing business with the app stores. This also has precedence - a lot of it, in fact - when it comes to security. The US blocks all kinds of foreign businesses from trading with American businesses. Like arms dealers and drug dealers.

So TikTok will need to defeat the idea that even as a foreign businesses they don’t need to be subject to the whims of the executive branches power to block foreign businesses AND that even congress doesn’t have the power to write a law that gives the executive branch this power (because, ya know, they just DID write that law).

And then TikTok will need to win on the idea that somehow their rights have been suppressed.

Seems like a long shot to me and the precedence that would be established by making it difficult for Congress to write laws that give the executive power to block foreign entities because it risks their unlikely right to speech in the US seems a bit whack.

Apparently, the classification levels in the US are illegal! Snowden will rejoice, he can come home, as the first amendment allows free speech, even when it damages national security.

I did not read the article, but the summary made me actually laugh out loud. Hell the supreme court has already said the government has the right to intern a whole class of US citizens based on national security. The SCOTUS rulings do seem rather crazy at times to me though, so perhaps this is a winning strategy for ByteDance.