The US government is being sued by TikTok

What the U.S. government can do about social media apps like TikTok: The case of the Silicon Data Collaborative app

In the case of TikTok, however, lawmakers have called the app a “spy balloon on your phone,” emphasizing how the Chinese government could gain access to the personal data of U.S. citizens.

Congress has never before passed legislation that could outright ban a wildly popular social media app, a gesture the U.S. government has criticized authoritarian nations for doing.

The law is based on flawed concerns that could be addressed through less restrictive and more precisely tailored means according to the filing.

Constitutional scholars say it’s not easy for the government to restrict speech in a way that can survive a legal challenge. The government can show a national security risk. Legal experts think that the government is showing that the speech suppression was the least restrictive option on the table.

Since then, Republicans and Democrats have come together in order to pressure TikTok to end it’s relationship with ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech giant.

Worries also persist in Washington that Beijing could influence the views of Americans by dictating what videos are boosted on the platform. That concern has only become heightened seven months before a presidential 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.

TikTok, for its part, says it has invested $2 billion on a plan, dubbed Project Texas, 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 supposed to build trust with U.S. lawmakers and users, but it turns out there is still some data between staff in California and Beijing.

TikTok, ByteDance and the U.S. War: A First Look at a Cold War with Israel’s Enclave

Steven Mnuchin is trying to organize a group of investors to buy TikTok without the app’s algorithm.

The proposal to buy the app is still in the works but he wouldn’t say when it would be submitted.

ByteDance does not intend to let go of its services despite the 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.

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