In late April, US President Joe Biden signed a bill requiring TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its rights in the social networking company, or face being banned from the country. Today, as expected, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government to fight the enforcement of the new law.

The recently signed law says China-owned ByteDance must sell TikTok 270 days after the law is signed, President Biden could give ByteDance a 90-day extension if the government feels a deal is close to being done. If TikTok is not sold by the deadline, the US could ban the service from US app stores.

Supporters of the law have argued that they don’t actually want to ban TikTok, but they do want to separate it from ByteDance because of US security concerns that data from TikTok owners could be sent to the Chinese government. The government has offered no evidence that this could happen, and TikTok has again denied And again for this scenario to happen.

in its submission today in US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (Through the border), TikTok stated:

For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single speech platform in the name of a permanent, nationwide ban, prohibiting any American from participating in a unique online community of more than a billion people worldwide.

TikTok added that this new law is “unconstitutional”, adding that the deadline to sell the social network is “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”. Even if such a sale were possible, TikTok says it would still be unconstitutional, adding:

If approved, it would allow the government to decide that a company is no longer allowed to own and advertise the innovative and unique speech platform it has created. If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by appealing to national security and ordering the publisher of every single newspaper or website to sell to avoid a shutdown.

TikTok is asking the court to rule that the law is unconstitutional and that the US Attorney General be barred from enforcing the law. The legal stage is now set for what could be a long court battle between TikTok and the US government.