US Department of Justice tells court to throw out TikTok’s appeal on crackdown law

WASHINGTON - The Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a US appeals court late on July 26 to uphold an April law requiring China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US assets by Jan 19 or face a ban.

The DOJ argued in its filing that TikTok under Chinese ownership poses a serious national security threat because of its access to vast amounts of Americans’ personal data, asserting China can covertly manipulate information that Americans consume via TikTok.

“The serious national security threat posed by TikTok is real,” the department said.

“TikTok provides the Chinese government the means to undermine US national security in two principal ways: data collection and covert content manipulation.”

The Biden administration asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reject lawsuits by TikTok, parent company ByteDance and a group of TikTok creators seeking to block the law that could ban the app used by 170 million Americans.

TikTok has repeatedly denied it would ever share US user data with China or that it manipulates video results.

“The government has never put forth proof of its claims, including when Congress passed this unconstitutional law. Today, once again, the government is taking this unprecedented step while hiding behind secret information,” TikTok posted on social media platform X in response to the DOJ brief.

The DOJ’s filing details wide-ranging national security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok.

“China’s long-term geopolitical strategy involves developing and pre-positioning assets that it can deploy at opportune moments,” the government said.

The US government acknowledged in a separate declaration it had no information that the Chinese government had gained access to the data of US TikTok users but said the risk of the possibility was too great.

“The United States is not required to wait until its foreign adversary takes specific detrimental actions before responding to such a threat,” the filing said.

The government also filed a classified document with the court detailing additional security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok as well as declarations from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

ByteDance told the US government that TikTok’s source code contained two billion lines of code, making a full review impossible.

“Oracle estimated it would require three years to review this body of code” excluding additional changes, DOJ added.

Signed by President Joe Biden on April 24, the law gives ByteDance until Jan 19 to sell TikTok or face a ban.

The White House says it wants to see Chinese-based ownership end on national security grounds, but not a ban on TikTok.

The department is rejecting all the arguments raised by TikTok, including that the law violates the First Amendment free speech rights of Americans that use the short video app, saying the law is aimed at addressing national security concerns, not speech, and is targeted at China’s ability to exploit TikTok to access Americans’ sensitive personal information.

TikTok users have “numerous other well-known platforms” such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X that they could use instead, the DOJ said.

The DOJ added that TikTok’s US$2 billion (S$2.7 billion) plan to protect US user data was insufficient, saying the company’s proposed agreement was not enough, in part because US officials do not trust ByteDance, and the government’s “lack of confidence that it had either the resources or capability to catch violations”.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hold oral arguments on the legal challenge on Sept 16, putting the fate of TikTok in the middle of the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has joined TikTok and said in June

he would never support a TikTok ban

.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is running for president, joined TikTok this week.

The law prohibits app stores like Apple and Alphabet’s Google from offering TikTok and bars internet hosting services from supporting TikTok unless it is divested by ByteDance.

Driven by worries among US lawmakers that China could access data on Americans or spy on them with the app, the measure was passed overwhelmingly in the US Congress just weeks after being introduced. REUTERS