The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was enacted in April, aims to safeguard national security by banning ByteDance-controlled applications, including TikTok, from U.S. app stores and web hosting services.
This legislation addresses the significant threat posed by Communist China’s ownership of these apps.
In response, TikTok has initiated legal challenges in Tiktok, et al. v. Garland, wrongly asserting that the law is unconstitutional.
Read: DOJ Accuses TikTok of Gathering Data On Americans’ Political Views For CCP
In response, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and U.S. Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI) have spearheaded a bipartisan, bicameral effort to defend the law’s constitutionality, emphasizing its focus on mitigating foreign adversary control rather than regulating speech.
“…the Divestiture Act does not regulate speech or require any social-media company to stop operating in the United States. The Divestiture Act is instead focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control and provides a clear, achievable path for affected companies to resolve the pressing and non-hypothetical national security threats posed by their current ownership structures.
“Backed by extensive fact-finding about the national security threat to the American people posed by certain foreign adversary controlled applications, the Divestiture Act resembles and, indeed, is narrower than numerous other restrictions on foreign ownership that Congress has enacted in other statutory regimes. And Congress did not transcend the limits imposed by the First Amendment and other Constitutional restraints, because ‘it is long settled as a matter of American constitutional law that foreign citizens outside U.S. territory do not possess rights under the U.S. Constitution.’”
Read: TikTok Ban Faces First Amendment Challenge: Legal Briefs Filed, Court Date Set
Rubio has led the charge to stop the Chinese Communist Party from using TikTok against the U.S., first speaking on the issue in 2019 and urging the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to conduct a thorough review of the national security implications of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly.
In his letter at the time, Rubio stated, “TikTok, which has millions of active users across the U.S., is now ranked among the world’s most downloaded apps. There continues to be ample and growing evidence that TikTok’s platform for Western markets, including those in the U.S., is censoring content that is not in line with the Chinese Government and Communist Party directives.”
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