TikTok’s U.S. employees are organizing a lawsuit against President Trump’s executive order that the workers think would bar the China-owned video app from paying them.
The employees are using a GoFundMe fundraiser that has collected more than $10,000 in two days to fund litigation for an injunction against Mr. Trump’s order. The TikTok employee who posted the solicitation for funding, Patrick Ryan, wrote that the company’s approximately 1,500 American employees want to raise $30,000 to pay for the initial litigation.
“We are only asking for the right to continue to receive paychecks, not for anything else: no damages or any other payout,” Mr. Ryan wrote on GoFundMe. “Any money raised but not spent will be donated to charity. All money will go straight to our law firm and I commit to provide final accounting of expenditures.”
The TikTok employees have retained attorney Mike Godwin, former first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Blackstone Law Group.
“I’m proud to be one of the lawyers now working on this case to defend TikTok employees’ rights,” Mr. Godwin said on Twitter. “I believe that the U.S. government with its overbroad executive order has put employees’ Constitutional rights, including the right to be paid, in jeopardy.”
Regarding speculation that TikTok may separately file its own lawsuit against the Trump administration over the executive order, TikTok declined to comment.
“[W]e have no involvement with and are not coordinating on the initiative of employees that has been undertaken in their personal capacity outside of work,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email. “We respect the rights of employees to engage in concerted activity to seek due process of law.”
TikTok’s legal dispute with the Trump administration is far from the only uphill battle it is facing with the U.S. government. Several federal agencies had already banned TikTok from government devices prior to Mr. Trump’s executive order, including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. military personnel. The U.S. Senate then passed legislation earlier this month to ban TikTok from all federal government devices.
Mr. Trump has said he has given TikTok until Sept. 15 to find an American owner or he would shut down the video app. Mr. Trump has spoken with Microsoft about their desire to acquire TikTok, and other companies such as Twitter have expressed an interest as well, according to reports.
If any American partner manages to make the business deal and overcome the Trump administration’s national security concerns, they may still face hurdles surrounding other privacy problems. TikTok is popular with young Americans and more than a third of its 49 million daily active users are 14 or younger, according to TikTok data obtained by the New York Times.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act requires websites and online services to get parental consent before collecting personal information such as a user’s name or email address. Musical.ly, which became a part of TikTok in 2018, agreed last year to pay a $5.7 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it violated that law.
Christoph Hebeisen, security intelligence research director at cybersecurity firm Lookout, said the data collected by TikTok is consistent with what many other applications collect but that does not mean users should feel confident that their data is kept safe. Mr. Hebeisen’s team studied TikTok and discovered that it was sending data to servers in China and Russia.
“Mobile security threats are only going to become more important,” Mr. Hebeisen said. “In terms of how serious they can get … we certainly see this can go extremely far and become very, very invasive.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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