By David Shepardson
The U.S. Justice Department late Friday asked a U.S. appeals court to dismiss legal challenges to a law requiring Chinese company ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets by Jan. 19 or face a ban.
“The serious national security threat posed by TikTok is real,” the department said. “TikTok provides the Chinese government with the means to undermine U.S. national security in two primary ways: data collection and manipulation of classified content.”
TikTok, its parent company ByteDance and a group of TikTok creators have filed lawsuits to block a law that could ban the app used by 170 million Americans.
The Justice Department filings include broad national security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok.
“China’s long-term geopolitical strategy involves developing and positioning assets that it can deploy at the right moments,” the government said.
“The United States should not wait for its foreign adversary to take specific harmful actions before responding to such a threat.”
The government is also submitting a confidential document to the court outlining additional security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok, as well as statements from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
The US Justice Department says the Chinese-owned TikTok app poses a serious national security threat to Americans because of its access to vast amounts of Americans’ personal data, and will allege that China is able to secretly manipulate the information Americans consume on TikTok.
TikTok, which has repeatedly denied that it would share US user data with China, did not immediately comment.
President Joe Biden signed the law on April 24, giving ByteDance until January 19 to sell TikTok or face a ban. The White House says it wants to end Chinese ownership on national security grounds, but not ban TikTok.
The department rejected all of TikTok’s arguments, including that the law violates the First Amendment free speech rights of Americans who use the short-form video app, saying the law is intended to address national security concerns, not free speech, and is aimed at China’s ability to exploit TikTok to access Americans’ sensitive personal information.
The government added that TikTok’s efforts to protect American users’ data were insufficient.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is scheduled to hold oral arguments on the legal challenge on September 16, putting TikTok’s fate in the middle of the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump joined TikTok and told an interviewer in June that 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 (NASDAQ:) and Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:) from offering TikTok and bars online hosting services from supporting TikTok unless it is pulled by ByteDance.
Amid concerns among US lawmakers that China could access data on or spy on Americans using the app, the measure passed overwhelmingly in the US Congress just weeks after it was introduced.
