WASHINGTON — In a new attack on one of the world’s most popular tech companies, the Justice Department is accusing TikTok of exploiting the ability to collect bulk information about users based on their views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion and religion.
Government lawyers wrote in documents filed Friday night with the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web suite system called Lark to allow TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.
TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about American users, information that ended up stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.
One of Lark’s internal research tools, according to the filing, allows ByteDance and TikTok employees in the U.S. and China to collect information about users’ content or expressions, including their views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok had tracked users who viewed LGBTQ content through a dashboard that the company said it has since removed.
The new court documents represent the government’s first major defense in a major legal battle over the future of the popular social media platform, used by more than 170 million Americans. Under a law signed by President Joe Biden in April, the company could be banned within months if it doesn’t cut ties with ByteDance.
The measure passed with bipartisan support after lawmakers and administration officials expressed concern that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or sway public opinion in Beijing’s favor by manipulating the algorithm that powers users’ feeds.
“Intelligence reports further demonstrate that ByteDance and TikTok Global took actions in response to (Chinese government) requests to censor content outside of China,” Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, wrote in a filing supporting the government’s arguments.
The Justice Department has warned in no uncertain terms of the risk of what it calls “covert manipulation of content” by the Chinese government, saying the algorithm could be designed to shape the content users receive.
“By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate this algorithm, China could, for example, continue its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions,” the brief said.
The Justice Department says the concern is more than theoretical: TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called “heating,” in which certain videos are promoted in order to gain a certain number of views. While this ability allows TikTok to curate popular content and distribute it more widely, U.S. officials say it can also be used for malicious purposes.
Federal authorities are asking the court to allow a classified version of the legal filing, which would not be accessible to the two companies.
Nothing in the redacted brief “changes the fact that the Constitution is on our side,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement.
“Banning TikTok would silence 170 million Americans, violating the First Amendment,” Haurek said. “As we have said before, the government has never provided evidence to support its claims, including when Congress passed this unconstitutional law. Today, once again, the government is taking this unprecedented step while hiding behind classified information. We remain confident that we will prevail in court.”
In the redacted version of the court documents, the Justice Department said another tool triggered content removal based on the use of certain words. Some of the tool’s policies applied to ByteDance users in China, where the company operates a similar app called Douyin that complies with Beijing’s strict censorship rules.
But Justice Department officials said other policies may have been applied to TikTok users outside of China. TikTok was investigating the existence of those policies and whether they had been used in the United States in or around 2022, the officials said.
The government is citing Lark’s data transfers to explain why federal officials don’t believe Project Texas, TikTok’s $1.5 billion mitigation plan to store U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by tech giant Oracle, is sufficient to guard against national security concerns.
In its lawsuit against the law, TikTok relies heavily on arguments that the potential ban violates the First Amendment because it prevents the app from continuing to express itself unless it attracts a new owner through a complex divestiture process. The company has also argued that the divestment would change the way the app expresses itself on the platform because it would create a version of TikTok without the algorithm that made it successful.
In its response, the Justice Department argued that TikTok had not raised any valid free speech claims, saying the law addresses national security concerns without targeting free speech, and contends that China and ByteDance, as foreign entities, are not protected by the First Amendment.
TikTok also argued that the U.S. law discriminates based on viewpoints, citing statements by some lawmakers criticizing what they saw as an anti-Israel bias on the platform during the Gaza war.
Justice Department officials dispute that argument, saying the law reflects their ongoing concern that China could use technology as a weapon against U.S. national security, a fear they say is compounded by demands that Beijing-controlled companies hand over sensitive data to the government. They say TikTok, as it currently operates, is required to meet those demands.
Arguments in the case are scheduled for September.
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