The gloves are off in the bout between the US Government and Chinese social media outfit, TikTok.
With TikTok’s forced exit from the US approaching, the US Department of Justice has laid out exactly why TikTok must either sell its US operations or close them down.
Data is central to the US Government’s argument. The most striking allegation is that while TikTok, like all social media platforms, gathers vast amounts of personal data from its 170 million users, it has been shipping this to China. This data is therefore not fenced off from the Chinese Government.
Data Flow to China
In the heavily redacted filing, shared by The Register, the Justice Department pointed at an internal tool called Lark that TikTok staff use for internal comms. It writes that this was used to convey “significant amounts of restricted US user data (including but not limited to personally identifiable information).”
It continues: “This resulted in certain sensitive US person data being contained in Lark channels and, therefore, stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees located in China.”
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Data Scraped for Edgy Themes
The filing states that internal search tools – developed and run by ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok – allow engineers at the company to “scrape” this data. This means engineers could search to gather specific information for political uses like “…bulk user information based on the user’s content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion.”
But the filing goes further and next suggests that these same tools could also be used for censoring content. They support the “…triggering of the suppression of content on the platform based on the user’s use of certain words.” The Justice Department admits that policies suggest this censorship is only applied to Chinese users but adds: “…other such policies may have been used to apply to TikTok users outside of China.” The implication is that the censorship tools are there but the Justice Department can’t prove that they have been deployed for US users…yet.
TikTok Cites First Amendment
The TikTok legal team has come back fighting against the filing and is calling on the First Amendment in its defense. In a post on X, it says: “Nothing in this brief changes the fact that the Constitution is on our side. The TikTok ban would silence 170 million Americans’ voices, violating the First Amendment.” It also slammed the law that is at the heart of the wrangle as “unconstitutional” and accused the US Government of “…hiding behind secret information.”
The Justice Department pre-empted this, slapping back that calling on Freedom of Speech does not apply when it is an issue of protecting US users’ data from a foreign power. It writes: “…the PRC has a strong interest in manipulating the American information space and a demonstrated history of successfully tasking ByteDance and TikTok Global to censor discourse on their platforms outside of the United States.”
Warning Off US Partners
And there is no use turning to Oracle, suggests the filing. The database giant had hoped it could become TikTok’s US technology partner under a “national security agreement” (NSA) and, as such, become keeper of US users’ data.
The Justice Department says that the proposed offer simply isn’t good enough and data will still be flowing back to China. It also threw out the suggestion that Oracle could overseer of TikTok’s source code as unworkable.
It even suggests that Oracle might be best served walking away as ByteDance will not be transparent with any US-based partner. “Private parties also lack insight into ByteDance’s communications with PRC officials, ByteDance’s use of US user data, and ByteDance’s other TikTok-related activities,” the filing states. Therefore the US Justice team had “…determined that the Final Proposed NSA presented too great a risk because the trusted technology provider and other monitors faced massive scope and scale hurdles that could not be overcome.”
TikTok continues to fight, shaking its fist and declaring that it will “prevail in court”. As the January 19th deadline creeps closer, and the US Government actively encourages American companies to step away, this is increasingly looking like a battle it won’t win. And not only that, but other governments are eagerly watching the outcome.
