Washington — TikTok, the widely popular social media app, and its parent company ByteDance have taken legal action against the Justice Department on Tuesday regarding a new law that mandates them to sever ties with their China-based owner within a year or face a potential ban in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., argues that the law signed by President Biden last month is unconstitutional. The lawsuit requests the court to prevent Attorney General Merrick Garland from enforcing the law.
The lawsuit lists TikTok and ByteDance as the plaintiffs and targets Garland as the defendant.
The recently passed foreign aid package by Congress included a provision that necessitated ByteDance, the parent company of the platform, to divest its ownership in TikTok within a year. Failure to comply with this one-year deadline would result in TikTok losing access to app stores and web-hosting services, effectively disconnecting it from its approximately 170 million users in the U.S.
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