TikTok Going to Sue Trump for Forcing Them to be Sold to a US Company Or It’ll Be Banned

Previously, President Donald Trump declared war on TikTok.

Basically, Trump suspects that TikTok could be collecting sensitive information on behalf of their country of origin, China, and he’s not happy about it.

Either that or he just wants to get back at China by banning TikTok from American soil.

Whichever his reason is, it doesn’t detract from the outcome: Either sell TikTok over to an American company or get off American soil.

Well, it turns out that TikTok isn’t exactly happy with Trump’s decision.

TikTok Going to Sue Trump for Forcing Them to be Sold to a US Company Or It’ll Be Banned

According to The Verge, TikTok has confirmed that they will be filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration, which issued an executive directive to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, ordering them to stop TikTok operations in the US.

A TikTok spokesperson said that they had spent nearly a year trying to provide a constructive solution to the Trump administration but they allegedly didn’t care about the facts and inserted themselves into negotiations between businesses.

Trump had signed off on an executive order on 6 Aug to block all transactions with ByteDance, which will take effect within 45 days.

Then, on 14 Aug, Trump signed off on a second executive order, giving ByteDance 90 days to either sell or spin off TikTok in the US.

So far, TikTok is suspected to be in talks with three American companies: Microsoft, Twitter and Oracle.

Executive Orders

President Donald Trump is a huge fan of executive orders and has used it on a myriad of different things, including to build a wall between the US and Mexico, preventing a few nationalities from travelling to the US and turning away all refugees.

The latest executive order Trump signed off on is targeted at social media companies, allegedly because Twitter had the guts to fact check POTUS.

On 26 May, Trump tweeted that Mail-in ballots are “substantially fraudulent” and that it would lead to a “Rigged Election”.

Trump was referring to the 2020 United States Presidential election and the proposal by many states for voters to mail in their ballots from their homes, rather than visit physical voting booths.

For some unknown reason, Trump believes that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.

Since there’s no evidence for this claim, Twitter decided to add a fact-checker warning to his tweets, with a link to a short article debunking Trump’s false claims.

This infuriated the world’s most orange politician, and he published a series of tweets accusing Twitter of interfering with the election and stifling free speech.

….Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

However, it might be more of a scare tactic than anything else, according to CNBC.

You can read more here.