A second US federal judge has suspended a Trump administration
executive order threatening to ban TikTok in the United States.
The preliminary injunction
granted late Monday by judge Carl Nichols in a district court in Washington DC
comes more than a month after a similar decision in Pennsylvania.
Nichols said TikTok’s lawyers
had demonstrated that the Commerce Department likely overstepped its authority
by seeking to ban the popular social media app and “acted in an arbitrary
and capricious manner by failing to consider obvious alternatives.”
The White House claims TikTok
is a national security risk because of potential links to the Beijing
government through its Chinese owner ByteDance.
President Donald Trump signed
an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business
with ByteDance — effectively setting a deadline for a sale of the app to a US
company.
Trump’s order said the action
was necessary to “protect our national security” and claimed the
personal data of TikTok users could be used by Beijing.
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TikTok has repeatedly
defended itself against allegations of data transfers to the Chinese
government, saying it stores user information on servers in the United States
and Singapore.
The latest order follows an
October 30 ruling by a federal court in Pennsylvania which issued a temporary
injunction blocking Trump’s ban.
After a complaint from three
TikTok content creators, Judge Wendy Beetlestone ordered the US administration
not to prevent other companies from providing essential services to the
platform, such as online hosting.
Beetlestone had considered
that the August 6 presidential decree should be suspended.
At the end of September,
judge Nichols had also issued a temporary injunction stopping the US from
banning downloads of the app, which he said would cause “irreparable
harm” to TikTok, but he refused to rule on its total ban in the United
States.
TikTok has a further fight on
its hands over an August 14 executive order from Trump to force ByteDance to
sell its US operations to an American buyer.
The US Treasury has
repeatedly extended the deadline for the Chinese group to divest, and indicated
on Friday it would continue negotiations to resolve the dispute.
TikTok has 100 million users
in the United States and 700 million worldwide.
Washington is in a tense
trade battle with Beijing, and Trump’s administration has stepped up warnings
about China’s growing economic and military power.
