Washington — TikTok, the widely popular social media app, and its parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department on Tuesday over a new law that requires it to cut ties with its China-based owner within a year or be effectively banned from the United States.
The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleges that the measure signed into law by President Biden last month is unconstitutional. The suit calls for the court to block Attorney General Merrick Garland from enforcing the measure.
The suit names TikTok and ByteDance as plaintiffs and was filed against Garland.
The foreign aid package passed by Congress last month included a provision that required the platform’s parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok within a year. If the company fails to meet that one-year deadline, TikTok would lose access to app stores and web-hosting providers, effectively cutting it off to the roughly 170 million users in the U.S.
This is a developing story
