A US federal judge issued an injunction on Friday temporarily blocking Trump’s order on Tikok.
San Francisco, United States:
A U.S. federal judge issued an injunction on Friday temporarily blocking an executive order by President Donald Trump to ban TikTok, launching a roadblock before the November 12 deadline.
The order reportedly took the Chinese-owned video-sharing app offline by cutting it off from US companies providing website hosting, data storage and other fundamentals needed to operate.
But TikTok influencers suing the president for the ban convinced U.S. District Court Wendy Beetlestone to issue an injunction against him.
This is the second restriction in favor of TikTok issued by US judges against a set of executive orders issued by Trump that sought to ban new downloads of the app from September and categorically ban it before the 12th. November.
A temporary injunction issued in September in a separate lawsuit filed by TikTok itself prevented the government from removing it from mobile app download platforms.
Judges in both cases have said in rulings that the odds of proving in court that Trump had exceeded his authority were good.
They also equated TikTok with movies, photographs, and newswires with legal protections.
Beetlestone noted in its ruling that the concerns expressed by the United States to justify the ban were expressed in a hypothetical manner.
The Trump administration has insisted on the need to ban TikTok, which has 100 million users in the United States, due to national security concerns.
The White House says TikTok has ties to the Chinese government through its parent company ByteDance.
TikTok has repeatedly defended itself against allegations of data transfers to the Chinese government.
It says its servers where user information is stored are located in the United States and Singapore.
The company also said the ban was not necessary as negotiations are underway to restructure TikTok ownership in order to address national security concerns raised by the administration.
A tentative deal has been unveiled that would make Silicon Valley giant Oracle the technology partner of TikTok and a stake in a new entity called TikTok Global.
