A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order to ban download of TikTok from U.S. mobile-app stores on Sunday.
President Donald Trump ordered the TikTok ban in August, citing fears that U.S. users’ personal information could fall into the hands of Chinese government officials.
During a hearing to review TikTok’s bid to halt the ban earlier Sunday, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols said it appeared that the Trump administration’s order was “largely a unilateral decision with very little opportunity for plaintiffs to be heard.”
Government lawyers argued the president had a right to take national security actions, and said the ban was needed because of TikTok’s links to the Chinese government through its parent firm ByteDance.
TikTok said it was pleased with the injunction and added that it “will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the president gave his preliminary approval to last week, into an agreement.”
The company’s lawyer John Hall had said a ban would be “punitive” and close off a public forum used by tens of millions of Americans.
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In a written brief filed ahead of the hearing, TikTok lawyers said the ban was “arbitrary and capricious” and “would undermine data security” by blocking updates and fixes to the app used by some 100 million Americans.
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