(San Francisco) A new stage in the standoff between the Chinese social network TikTok and the American government as the Department of Justice (DoJ) filed its arguments on Friday with the federal court which must determine whether or not the law aimed at forcing the sale of this application complies with the Constitution.
The US Congress passed a bill in April forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its social network within nine months, or risk banning it in the United States. According to the Chinese group, this law violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression.
But the US government says the law is intended to address national security concerns, not to limit freedom of expression. The US executive says ByteDance cannot rely on First Amendment protection in this case.
According to the arguments filed by the DoJ, these concerns relate to the fact that ByteDance must respond to requests from Chinese authorities for access to American user data, but also to the fact that the group could censor or highlight specific content on its platform.
“Given TikTok’s broad reach in the United States, China’s ability to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching goal of harming U.S. interests creates a national security threat of immense depth and breadth,” the DoJ wrote in its submission.
TikTok is giving Beijing the “means to undermine U.S. national security” by collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from U.S. users and using a proprietary algorithm to control which videos users view, the filing said.
“This algorithm can be manipulated manually,” the DoJ adds. Furthermore, “its location in China would allow the Chinese government to covertly control the algorithm—and thus covertly shape the content that U.S. users receive,” it points out.
“The Constitution is on our side,” TikTok replied on Saturday.
PHOTO SEBASTIEN BOZON, ARCHIVES AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
“Like a weapon”
“Banning TikTok would silence the voices of 170 million Americans, in violation of the First Amendment,” the social network protested on X, referring to TikTok users in the United States.
“As we have already said, the government has never provided proof of its claims,” including when the law was adopted, he accuses.
But U.S. intelligence officials are concerned about the possibility of Beijing “weaponizing” mobile apps, a U.S. official said.
“It is clear that the Chinese government has been seeking for years to get its hands on vast amounts of Americans’ data in any way it can, including cyberattacks and purchasing data online, and has been training artificial intelligence models to use that data,” a DoJ official said.
For TikTok, the sale is “simply impossible,” and even more so within the given deadline.
And “for the first time in history, Congress has passed a law that targets a single platform, imposing a nationwide ban on it and preventing every American from participating in a unique global community of more than a billion people,” TikTok and ByteDance denounce in the complaint they filed.
The end of TikTok?
ByteDance has said it has no intention of selling TikTok, and has maintained a legal approach – which could go all the way to the US Supreme Court – as the only response to prevent the ban on January 19, 2025.
The United States has been trying for many years to shut down TikTok’s operations in the country. Former President Donald Trump opened hostilities, without success.
An initial complaint from TikTok led to the court suspending Mr. Trump’s decree, with the judge finding that the risks associated with the application were largely overestimated and that freedom of expression was threatened.
The new law is intended to circumvent the legal hurdle. Some experts believe the Supreme Court could uphold it because national security concerns outweigh the protection of free speech.
For the time being, it is difficult to envisage the possibility of a takeover of this network which has more than a billion users worldwide.
Especially since the digital giants, probably the only ones with sufficient resources, risk being rejected by the competition authorities who will seek to avoid too strong a concentration of a sector already in the hands of a few players.