TikTok will not back down in its fight against a U.S. Government move to oblige it to sell off. Thus, it filed its latest legal opposition to the bill late last week.

In a new legal filing, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have described the bill as "the most sweeping speech restriction in this country's history." Which sounds extreme, but TikTok's insistence that the divestiture bill amounts to a near-ban because the articulated parameters and requirements would be impossible for TikTok to meet before the bill is set to take effect.

As the court filing states:

The government's attempted rehabilitation of the Act is almost as shattering of precedent as the Act itself. It says the Court should ignore Congress's failure to enact findings explaining why it imposed this unprecedented speech restriction-and instead offers post hoc justifications resting on speculation and demonstrably erroneous factual assertions. It relies on secret submissions that it seeks to exempt from adversarial testing and public view. It sweeps aside Congress's denial of the protections it afforded all other companies-depriving only Petitioners of a statutory basis to contest that they are "controlled by a foreign adversary" or pose a threat. The Government's core legal contention-that a towering speech restriction is subject to mere rational-basis review-violates decades of settled precedent.

Basically, TikTok's argument is that the law does not have identifiable evidence but is solely based on the perception of a threat from a "foreign adversary". There seems to be little evidence that might possibly point towards TikTok and ByteDance colluding with the Chinese Government, which could be a potential security threat, and this is what TikTok now uses as an argument in addressing the bill or attempting to pressure the Government to give it more evidence.

And which the government may have. The U.S. Justice Department recently claimed that TikTok has tracked U.S. users' views on sensitive issues, and shared that information with its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is required to pass on such info with the Chinese government on request.
The Justice Department claims it has evidence to show that TikTok has used information it obtained from U.S. users to urge them to view propaganda inside the app on behalf of the Chinese Government, while censoring other content as demanded by the CCP.

So if it comes to it, the Government may well have this sort of evidence at their disposal, though it hasn't seemingly produced such as yet.

Which does TikTok's legal team rely on in its rejoinder:

The government's defense of the Act fails as a matter of law, and the Act must be enjoined. But if the Court concludes it must consider the government's factual claims and secret evidence, it should temporarily enjoin the Act and establish a fair process for meaningful judicial review. With the speech of 170 million Americans at stake, the Constitution demands nothing less.

In this case, TikTok will dismiss the case or temporarily delay by enjoining the proposal.

It is hard to read that as being an effective counter-push from TikTok because the Government will use national security concerns to steamroll the bill through, which will override most of these protests. That the push is coming from the government itself is key in this context, because it means that the highest levels of government have already reviewed and agreed to the implementation of such in law.

That could render much of TikTok's protests moot, but on the other hand if a court does rule in its favor, it will likely see the bill delayed.

The bill is expected to take effect at the beginning of next year, but TikTok expects this challenge to push out the deadline at least to 2026. The significance of this is that if Donald Trump wins the next election, he is in a position to overturn the ban, which might be hard to do within such narrow timelines.

He's said that he's opposed to a ban on TikTok, although, when he was still President, in 2020, he included the bill to implement a TikTok ban. Its main hope now appears to be that the ban may be delayed long enough for a Trump White House to allow the bill to die, and that it may stay in the U.S.

So, actually speaking, the award here could be as much about delay as it is about dismissal of the plan.

We will have to wait and see how the Justice Department responds to this latest move.