The TikTok ban is back in court — in Meta’s antitrust trial
TikTok is back in a Washington, DC courthouse discussing the US law that - at least on paper - effectively banned the app. But this time, it's serving as a witness for the government, not fighting against it.
On Wednesday, TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety Adam Presser testified in the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta, in the same courthouse where a panel of judges ruled that the government could expel TikTok from the country. Presser's role in the Meta trial was to explain the ways in which TikTok competes (or doesn't) with Meta's services in a market the FTC has defined as personal social networking - a category the FTC says contains only Meta's services, Snapchat, and a small app called MeWe.
Lawyers for both the FTC and Meta brought up filings TikTok made in its own litigation against the 2024 divest-or-ban law, which required Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its US business. (President Donald Trump has used dubious legal measures to extend the deadline for enforcement twice, leaving TikTok's service providers facing the potential for billions of dollars in penalties while saying he's working on a deal.) The FTC pointed to a TikT …