A group of TikTok creators, including a rancher, a skin care entrepreneur and a Bible literacy promoter, sued the federal government on Tuesday over a new law that would force the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the company or face a ban in the United States. They said it violated their First Amendment rights.
The eight creators “have found their voices, amassed significant audiences, made new friends, and found new and different ways of thinking, all thanks to TikTok’s novel way of hosting, curating, and disseminating speech,” the complaint says. The possible ban “threatens to deprive them, and the rest of the country, of this distinctive means of expression and communication.”
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which the new law designated as jurisdiction for challenges, was anticipated as the company’s next step after it filed its own lawsuit against the federal government. last week, calling the law unconstitutional. TikTok said it was paying the creators’ legal fees for the lawsuit.
TikTok followed a similar legal strategy in 2020, when creators successfully challenged a federal ban, as well as last year in Montana, when creators sued the state after it attempted to ban the app. Davis Wright Tremaine, the law firm representing the creators, also represented the app’s creators in Montana last year.
TikTok is fighting for its future in the United States after President Biden signed the law in April. Concerns had been growing for years among lawmakers and intelligence officials that the Chinese government could rely on ByteDance to hand over sensitive data on TikTok users or use the app to spread propaganda.
TikTok rejected those claims and said it had spent billions of dollars to address security issues. Many legal experts expect the dispute over the law to reach the Supreme Court.
The government has not yet responded to TikTok’s filing last week. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuit.
The creators’ lawsuit said a sale of ByteDance’s TikTok was “unfeasible, as the company has stated and as the publicly available record confirms.” He argued that the law was therefore a ban that would violate its users’ First Amendment rights.
Similar to TikTok’s lawsuit last week, the complaint asked the court to issue a declaratory judgment saying the law violated the Constitution and to issue an order that would prevent Attorney General Merrick B. Garland from enforcing it.
The creators represent a variety of people who use the app in the United States, where TikTok says it has 170 million monthly users. They include Brian Firebaugh, a first-generation rancher in Texas, and Paul Tran, who runs a skin care brand with his wife. Other plaintiffs include Christopher Townsend, a hip-hop artist who shares Bible quizzes with his followers, and Kiera Spann, an advocate for sexual assault survivors.
Firebaugh, who has more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, “would have to get a different job and pay for daycare instead of raising his son at home” without income from TikTok’s fund for popular creators and sales of ranch products offered to through the app. , the lawyers wrote. Townsend, who has 2.5 million followers, “faces losing the platform on which he can express his beliefs and share his spirituality and music with the world,” the complaint said.
The creators attempted to use other social media apps such as Instagram “with much less success,” according to the complaint. He also said that TikTok’s “defining traits arise from the editorial decisions it makes using its proprietary content recommendation technology.” A change in ownership could “fundamentally” change user experiences.
The complaint also noted statements lawmakers had made arguing that TikTok had pushed pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel views among its young users. “These arguments center around censoring TikTok’s content recommendation system,” the complaint said, adding that there was no evidence that TikTok was promoting propaganda to Americans.