Trump Administration Sued Over TikTok Deal
A startup law firm is suing the Trump administration for approving the sale of a U.S. version of TikTok to a joint venture of Oracle and other companies, including the China-based ByteDance.
In a complaint filed Thursday in Washington, D.C. federal court, the Public Integrity Project claims that the $14 billion sale wrongly allows ByteDance to “control all the essential elements of TikTok.”
Former Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, is among the leaders of the Public Integrity Project, a two-month old firm that aims to fight corruption.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of two software engineers and stock investors — Alphabet investor Zhaocheng Anthony Tan and Meta Platforms investor Garrett Reid — alleges that the deal “facially violated the TikTok Law” by allowing ByteDance to continue to play a role in TikTok’s operations.
“ByteDance could continue to push Chinese propaganda and censor the content it does not like, exactly the harm that the law was intended to prevent,” the complaint alleges.
Related Knowledge Center: The TikTok ban
The U.S. Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law a measure banning TikTok if it weren’t sold by its Chinese ownership. But now-President Donald Trump gave the service a reprieve, and a sale of its U.S. operations appears imminent.