Efforts to ban “Glory to Hong Kong,” a song popularized during pro-democracy protests in 2019, could set up a legal battle between tech giants and Hong Kong.

A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is seeking a court order aimed at banning its residents from playing protest song “Glory to Hong Kong," which can be used to advocate the separation of the city from China.

The Justice Department seeks to ban the broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, sale offering, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing in any media forms and channels the song.

Officials are seeking a court order to block online dissemination of a popular pro-democracy anthem, in the first major test for U.S. tech platforms over politically sensitive content.

Hong Kongers rushed to download a song associated with the 2019 protests after the government sought to get the courts to outlaw the unofficial anthem. Variations of Glory to Hong Kong accounted for all of the top 10 slots on Apple Inc.

The Hong Kong government said on Tuesday that it asked a court to ban a protest song in a bid to prevent people from inciting secession or insulting China's national anthem.