TikTok argued that the order was “not rooted in bona fide national security concerns” and that the administration did not conduct a fair process in deciding the app needed to be banned. The company also argues that the administration’s action is threatening the 10,000 jobs of TikTok employees in the United States.
“We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees,” the company said in a blog post, explaining the decision to sue.
The lawsuit could buy TikTok more time as it tries to find a buyer.
Trump’s orders targeting the company have given potential acquirers an upper hand, because TikTok faces a time crunch and less leverage in any potential sale. Any delay or intervention from the courts would give TikTok higher ground.
Top American investors in ByteDance, General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, want to be part of a deal to acquire the social video app, and they’re pushing for a sale to Oracle, the Wall Street Journal reported last night. Microsoft has also emerged as a potential acquirer for the company, but the American investors are concerned they wouldn’t have a place in that deal.
TikTok is a massive business – which according to the lawsuit now has 91.9 million monthly active users in the United States in June, up from 26.7 million in February 2019. That could make a sale in the short, 45-day window that the Trump administration created challenging to engineer.
Here are TikTok’s key arguments as it seeks to avoid a ban.
TikTok says the Trump administration ignored its efforts to address its concerns about how it handles user data.
The company argues that it took extensive action to address the Trump administration’s national security concerns, including providing documentation about its security practices as the U.S. government reviewed the ByteDance acquisition of Musical.ly, which became TikTok.
The company has “taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products,” TikTok said in the lawsuit.
The company argues the Trump administration is misusing emergency powers to invoke the ban.
The Trump administration says it is acting under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. TikTok argues that Trump can only prohibit transactions that have been found to pose “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” and that its business does not.
The company also argues that the Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment because it did not give the company notice or a chance to be heard before it signed the order that could ban it.
The action was politicized, TikTok says.
The Trump administration’s action comes as the president intensified his rhetoric against China ahead of the 2020 election. The president has also called for taxpayers to receive a cut of TikTok’s sale to an American buyer.
“Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine…,” the lawsuit says.
But the company faced some political blowback for filing the suit.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said the company should not be permitted to bring the suit in the court system:
Our top tabs
The pandemic is straining social media’s fleet of volunteer moderators.
Political tensions over police brutality and the coronavirus have turned even the most apolitical groups into battlegrounds, Heather Kelly reports.
“Everybody’s a little more combative and gets a little more emotional,” said Caitlin Welch, who volunteers as a moderator for several Facebook groups. Welch is among many moderators who have found their jobs made more difficult as more users are pushed online for socialization.
Both Reddit and Facebook have seen a surge in use during the pandemic, the companies report. The rise in activity has also come with a rise in disagreement.
“Conversations are becoming increasingly charged in spaces where people are not necessarily used to seeing politically charged conversations,” says Kat Lo, a content moderation lead at technology nonprofit group Meedan.
Big sites such as Facebook have hired teams of content moderators and also increasingly turned to technology to help moderate problematic content. But volunteer moderators who have large domain over the site’s private groups are left with nuanced and difficult decisions.
Social media companies have responded to the pressure with some changes. Reddit enacted a new ban on hate speech and started testing a program to train and certify moderators. Facebook has added resources for moderators including one on conflict resolution.
Apple will reopen some U.S. retail stores twice shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks.
The reopening could begin as soon as this month, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg News reports. Apple has not publicly announced any plans, but sources say that most locations will operate on an appointment-only basis.
The company told retail employees at relevant stores that reopenings would follow local guidelines for social distancing and that customers and employees will be required to undergo temperature checks, Mark reports. Apple reassigned thousands of retail employees to online sales and support positions during the closures.
Apple began to slowly reopen some stores shuttered during the pandemic in May, only to re-close more than 120 as cases began to spike again across the United States.
Apple is expected to launch a new iPhone in the coming months, which could put a higher demand on retail locations.
Epic Games won a temporary, partial victory over Apple in court yesterday.
A federal judge issued a temporary order blocking Apple from removing Epic Games’s developer accounts. The order did not grant Epic Games relief to get Apple to put its popular Fortnite game back on the App Store, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reports.
Epic has claimed that if Apple removes its developer accounts, it would hurt hundreds of users of its Unreal Engine software tool.
The legal battle between the games company and Apple kicked off earlier this month when Epic introduced its own system to make in-game purchases, a violation of Apple App Store rules.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers grilled Apple about its developer fees, which are the issue at the heart of the legal battle, Bloomberg reports. Epic contends that Apple extorts developers with its 30 percent fee because it benefits from a lion’s share of the phone market.
“There is no competition. The question is, without competition, where does the 30% (App Store commission) come from? Why isn’t it 10? 20? How is the consumer benefiting from, you (Apple) get to say what you want it to be?” she asked.
Hill happenings
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) wants the tech industry to step up to bridge the homework gap.
The Virginia Democrat urged Dell, Apple, HP, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Acer Amerca and ASUS USA to provide discounted or donated laptops to school districts and families struggling to get their students online this fall.
Nearly 17 million students lack the Internet access and devices they need to connect to online schools. That problem has been exacerbated by Chinese supply-chain issues, which has left companies including Lenovo, HP and Dell with a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops, the Associated Press reported.
“Vulnerable students who already face numerous hardships are then further disadvantaged when they cannot access a remote education due to device unavailability,” Warner wrote in letters to the companies. “While I understand the strains placed on the global supply chain, your prioritization of these matters would greatly assist struggling families at this challenging time.”
Warner offered to help connect the companies to local education officials and administrators in Virginia.
Republicans are demanding Amazon explain why it excludes some conservative nonprofit organizations from its charity-support program.
The group, led by House Judiciary ranking Republican Jim Jordan (Ohio), slammed the e-commerce giant for relying on a list of hate groups published by the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which nonprofits are eligible for the program.
“Amazon’s ongoing reliance on the SPLC, with its documented anti-conservative track record, reinforces allegations that Big Tech is biased against conservatives and censors conservative views,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to chief executive Jeff Bezos. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The AmazonSmile program allows users to donate 0.5% of the price of some items to eligible nonprofit groups of their choice. Lawmakers have been escalating their claims that the industry is biased against conservatives in recent weeks, a charge tech companies have vehemently denied for years.
Inside the industry
A Zoom outage disrupted the first day back to school for thousands of users.
The partial outages began at 9 a.m. Eastern time and were resolved by midday, Hamza Shaban reports. It’s unclear how many users were affected. At least two school districts and Pennsylvania State University reported the outage delaying their first day of classes.
The outage highlights the precariousness of relying on videoconferencing technology during the pandemic.
“It really shows just how important this kind of technology is and how this technology has, generally speaking, enabled us to pretty seamlessly transition to working from home,” said Julie Samuels, executive director of Tech: NYC, a group that represents New York-based technology firms. “If the pandemic had struck even 10 years ago, it’s inconceivable how we would have functioned, and I think this morning kind of indicated that.”
Trending
Daybook
- The Republican National Convention will take place Monday through Thursday.
- The Brookings Institute will hold an event titled “Can we alleviate racism and systemic inequality by expanding broadband during COVID-19?” today at 2 p.m.
- The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab will hold an event on foreign interference, disinformation and the 2020 election with leaders from the private and public section today at 1 p.m.
Rant and rave
Miss the first night of the Republican National Convention? Here were some of Twitter’s favorite moments.
Social media users pointed out the night’s first speaker, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, closely resembled Fox News host Tucker Carlson:
We will leave the caption for this up to your imagination. The New York Times’ Charlie Warzel:
