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SAN FRANCISCO – TikTok, the short-form viral video app, on Wednesday filed for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration, a legal move aimed at protecting the company’s service in the United States against a possible ban.
The request, filed in District Court for the District of Columbia, is in response to Commerce Department rules that Apple and Google remove the TikTok app from their respective app stores by Sunday for US users and stop providing More software updates to people who have downloaded the application in the United States.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, has been working lately to complete a deal that would keep it operating in the United States. In August, President Trump signed executive orders requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s operations in the US or risk stopping its transactions in the country. The White House has positioned the American presence of TikTok as a threat to national security.
ByteDance and government officials have worked to find a solution for months. On Saturday, Trump said he had “blessed” a proposed deal between TikTok, Oracle and Walmart, under which the two US companies would get a 20 percent stake in a new entity called TikTok Global.
But Trump said Monday that he would not approve any deal in which ByteDance continues to have a stake in the app. TikTok has said that ByteDance would have an 80 percent stake in the new TikTok Global until the app goes public in about a year. Oracle has said that ByteDance would not own any of the applications directly; instead, its investors would receive shares in TikTok and have a direct stake in the app.
It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government will take steps to block any deal. Last month, Beijing announced new export restrictions that appeared to prohibit the sale of the valuable TikTok algorithm without a license, making the outright acquisition of the app by a US company less feasible.
On Wednesday, China Daily, the official English-language newspaper of the Chinese government, called the TikTok deal “dirty and unfair and based on harassment and extortion.”
In its filing on Wednesday, TikTok requested that an expedited hearing for a preliminary injunction be held before Sunday’s deadline. The company said it had “made extraordinary efforts to try to meet the changing demands of the government and alleged national security concerns.”
“There is simply no genuine emergency here that justifies the hasty actions of the government,” TikTok said in its presentation. “And there is no plausible reason to insist that the bans be applied immediately.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok said that the ban on its service would cause irreparable harm to the company if allowed to continue. TikTok said it was adding more than 400,000 new users the day before July 1, when rumors of a possible ban began to circulate, and that its growth would be hampered if people were disconnected from the service.
David McCabe contributed reporting from Washington and Raymond Zhong from Taipei, Taiwan.
