The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has accused TikTok of secretly collecting American users’ views on abortion, gun control, and religion. The DOJ has accused the Chinese-owned TikTok of gathering bulk information on U.S. users based on views on divisive social issues and sending this sensitive data to its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance. In April, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill forcing TikTok to divest from its parent company ByteDance or face a nationwide ban in the U.S. According to the law, ByteDance must sell its stake in TikTok to a non-Chinese entity by mid-January 2025. However, in May, TikTok sued the U.S. government in an effort to block the law that requires the app to be sold or face a ban in the country. In documents filed to the federal appeals court in Washington, the DOJ argued that measures that TikTok previously offered to address the government’s security concerns were insufficient.
According to AP News, government lawyers alleged that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China. Federal officials claimed that TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users in bulk, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China. The filed documents state that one of Lark’s internal search tools permits ByteDance and TikTok employees in the U.S. and China to gather information on users’ content or expressions, including views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion. The Justice Department argues that this is not a theoretical point of concern but an opportunity for TikTok to covertly manipulate the algorithm on TikTok, an app where a user is presented with a series of videos based upon a complex algorithm that is supposed to be tailored to a person’s interest. “By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm, China could for example further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions,” the brief states. Justice Department officials add that TikTok and ByteDance employees already engage in a practice called “heating” where they can decide to promote specific videos to receive a certain number of views, which U.S. officials say that the company can use to curate videos that could prove divisive. “Given TikTok’s broad reach within the United States, the capacity for China to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching objective to undermine American interests creates a national-security threat of immense depth and scale,” the U.S. government said in its filing.
The new court documents represent the U.S. government’s first major defense in a consequential legal battle over the future of TikTok, which is used by more than 170 million Americans. Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
