TikTok founders sue U.S. because divestment legislation violates First Amendment.

According to a post on X, eight TikTok artists sued the U.S. government on Tuesday to stop the new law that forces ByteDance, the company based in China that owns the social media app, to sell its shares or face a ban in the U.S. They said the law breaks the First Amendment and wanted to stop it.

The group says in the document shared by lawyer Davis Wright Tremaine that the law, which gives ByteDance nine months to sell the app, “undermines the nation’s founding principles and free marketplace of ideas.”

The case says that the law “promises to shutter a discrete medium of communication that has become part of American life, prohibiting Petitioners from creating and disseminating expressive material with their chosen editor and publisher.”

This past week, TikTok sued the US over the law, using free speech as an additional reason for its case. In their case, TikTok and ByteDance say that the sales that the law requires are “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, and not legally.”

The TikTok bill was passed by Congress along with bills that helped Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. On April 24, President Joe Biden signed the bill into law. Some people are worried that the Chinese-owned app could be dangerous to national security because of how the company collects data.

Brian Firebaugh, a cowboy from Texas, is one of the people who worked on the latest claim. The document says that Firebaugh makes money from the TikTok Creator Fund and from selling things that are pushed on the app.

The claim says that Firebaugh would have to get a new job and pay for babysitting if he couldn’t use TikTok. It also says that Firebaugh would have to raise his son at home. Firebaugh is said to have said in the suit, “If you ban TikTok, you ban my way of life.”

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