The US Commerce Department recently stated that it would “vigorously defend” an executive order that seeks to ban all transactions made with the Chinese owned short video sharing platform, TikTok. This statement arrived after a federal judge halted the action.
According to a Reuters report, the commerce department stated that it intends to “comply with the injunction … but intends to vigorously defend the (executive order) and the Secretary’s implementation efforts from legal challenges.” Back in October, the US District Judge Wendy Beetlestone blocked the Commerce Department’s order that was set to take effect on 12th November 2020. This order would’ve effectively banned TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, from operating in the US
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The Trump administration had also called out the social media application as a national security threat, with personal data being collected of over 100 million Americans that use the app. TikTok has strongly denied the allegations. Beetlestone’s noted that the “government’s own descriptions of the national security threat posed by the TikTok app are phrased in the hypothetical.”
Furthermore, another US District Judge Carl Nichols issued a preliminary injunction in a suit brought by ByteDance that also prevented the Commerce Department from ordering Apple and Google from removing the app from their respective app stores. At the moment, ByteDance is in talks for preliminary deals with Walmart and Oracle, either of which would oversee TikTok’s US operations. In other words, keep the app grounded within the US, which is something the US President himself approves of.
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