The Inconsistency of the ByteDance Law and the Competition It Entails: A New Look at TikTok
“Banning TikTok is so unconstitutional that the Act’s sponsors have tried to depict the law not as a ban at all but as a regulation of TikToK’s ownership,” the filing states.
In the petition filed in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the company said the legislation exceeds the bounds of the constitution and suppresses the speech of millions of Americans.
The law is based on flawed concerns about data security and could be addressed more narrowly with less restrictive means, according to the filing.
Constitutional scholars say there are few ways that the government can restrict speech in a way that is legal. If the government is able to demonstrate a national security risk, that’s one of those ways. The speech suppression was the least restrictive of the options that were on the table.
ByteDance, not TikTok, developed and controls the algorithm that determines what millions see on the app every day. The technology has become the envy of Silicon Valley, and no U.S. tech company has been able dislodge TikTok’s firm hold on the short-form video market. Experts say key to its success is its highly engaging and hyper-personalized video-ranking algorithm.
Why does China have the right to enforce the espionage against me? The case of TikTok and its U.S. subsidiary Project Texas
Worries also persist in Washington that Beijing could influence the views of Americans by dictating what videos are boosted on the platform. The concern has only been raised seven months before the election.
There is no publicly available example of the Chinese government attempting to use TikTok as an espionage or data collection tool. And no proof that the Chinese government has ever had a hand over what TikTok’s 170 million American users see every day on the app.
Project Texas is a plan by TikTok to separate its U.S. operation from its Chinese parent company. It deleted all of Americans’ data from foreign servers and relocated all of the data to servers on U.S. soil overseen by the Austin-based tech company Oracle.
The plan was meant to build trust but reports show that data is still moving between staff in California and Beijing.
Steven Mnuchin, a former Treasury Secretary, told NPR that he’s going to assemble a group of people to buy TikTok.
During his speech at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, he said that the proposal to buy the app is in the works, but wouldn’t say when it would be submitted.
ByteDance intends to keep its service even though there is a new law in the U.S. Furthermore, winning the support of China would be necessary, and officials in Beijing are adamantly against any forced sale.
The algorithm, which involves millions of lines of software code developed by thousands of engineers over many years, cannot be easily transferred to the U.S., even if China did allow it, TikTok’s challenge states.
How far can we go from a derivation of the first grand-unified law? Revisitation of Hans’ paper “On how the courts should validate a new supersymmetric piece of evidence”
“Without public discussion of what exactly the risks are, however, it’s difficult to determine why the courts should validate such an unprecedented law,” says Hans.
