A TikTok employee in the United States has launched a GoFundMe campaign on behalf of its entire U.S. staff in an effort to raise funds to file an injunction against the White House's executive orders aimed the popular video platform and its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
"There are two executive orders, and we'd like to stop them,” technical program manager Patrick Ryan said in a video shared on Monday. "We’re looking at our own rights as employees here of ByteDance in the United States and we’d like your help."
In early August, President Trump signed a pair of executive orders that would ban TikTok and WeChat from doing business in the United States unless their operations were sold off to an American company.
On Friday, President Trump signed another executive order requiring ByteDance to divest all U.S. assets, including the popular video app, within 90 days, stating that "any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd. (a.k.a. Zìjié Tiàodòng), Beijing, China, or its subsidiaries."
The rule also requires the app to delete all of its user data following claims by the White House that the information could be potentially be passed along to the Chinese government.
Ryan argues that the restriction means "approximately 1,500 ByteDance and TikTok employees in the USA will lose their paychecks as of September 20, 2020, because “any transaction by any person” is illegal after the order goes into effect." He also noted that employees of TikTok "have Constitutional rights and interests in this situation that are separate from our employer’s."
"Please help us assert those rights by raising $30,000 to file an injunction so that a court can order the government to change the order so that TikTok can still pay employees," Ryan wrote. "Although it will cost much more to fully litigate the issue, we believe we can obtain an injunction with this initial budget. We are only asking only for the right to continue to receive paychecks, not for anything else: no damages or any other payout."
Ryan added that all of the funds will go straight to legal representation and that anything left over will be donated to charity.
While TikTok has threatened to take legal action against the orders, they say they have no involvement in the crowdfunding campaign.