Eight TikTok creators filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on Tuesday, contending that a new law mandating the sale or ban of the popular video-sharing app infringes on their First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., argues that the law “bans an entire medium of communication and all the speech communicated through that medium, even though the vast majority of that speech is protected.”
Signed into law last month by Joe Biden, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban the app from the U.S. market if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, does not divest it. The lawsuit filed Tuesday describes TikTok as a critical “part of American life.”
The group of plaintiffs includes Brian Firebaugh, a rancher from rural Texas; Chloe Joy Sexton, a Tennessee baker and cookie business owner; Talia Cadet, a book reviewer in the D.C. area; Timothy Martin, a college football coach in North Dakota; Kiera Spann, a political activist in North Carolina; Paul Tran, a skincare brand founder in Georgia; Topher Townsend, a rapper from Mississippi; and Steven King, a comedy creator in Arizona.
The lawsuit argues that the ban “threatens to deprive them, and the rest of the country, of this distinctive means of expression and communication.”
The creators, many of whom have posted videos expressing their concerns, argue that a TikTok ban could jeopardize their livelihoods, as they have built large communities on the platform. The lawsuit states that all the plaintiffs “have tried using other social media apps, with far less success.” For example, Sexton began making videos on TikTok after losing her job in 2020 and now has over 2.2 million followers. Her success on the app enabled her to launch a cookie company and publish a cookbook.
TikTok, with its 170 million American users, has faced scrutiny from lawmakers for years. Supporters of the law argue that the platform, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, poses a national security threat to the United States.
However, TikTok has contested this notion. In its lawsuit, TikTok argued that invoking national security concerns is not enough reason to restrict free speech. It asserted that the burden is on the federal government to prove the necessity of such restrictions, which it has failed to do, according to the lawsuit.
Read the lawsuit here.
