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Will US law banning TikTok prevail on secret government evidence?
Chinese-owned app’s legal case said to turn on information kept not only from the public but also from lawyers for the petitioners
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Khushboo Razdanin Washington
On July 28, the director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute posted a US Justice Department document on social media related to TikTok’s legal challenge against the company’s potential ban in the United States.
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“The Biden admin has finally told the DC Circuit why Americans can’t have access to TikTok,” wrote Jameel Jaffer, on X, formerly Twitter.
The post comprised a page from a brief submitted to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, entirely obscured by black marking and unreadable.
In a subsequent post, Jaffer quipped: “To be fair, not all of the brief is redacted. But the parts that aren’t redacted are no more persuasive than the parts that are.”
The disclosure came months after the US Congress and President Joe Biden supported bipartisan legislation requiring TikTok, a Chinese-owned short-video platform used daily by 170 million Americans, to either secure a non-Chinese buyer by January 19, 2025, or face removal from stateside app stores and web-hosting services.
TikTok ban bill clears first hurdle in US Congress
In backing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which became law in April, Washington lawmakers and officials cited a broad US national-security concern: the possibility that Beijing could force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to alter its algorithm in a way that could harm US interests.
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