DOJ Urges Court To Reject TikTok Lawsuit Challenging Divest-Or-Ban Law

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by TikTok seeking to block a new U.S. law that could lead to a nationwide ban on the video-sharing app.

President Joe Biden signed the new law in April, requiring either the sale of the app by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, by next year or face its removal from app stores and web-hosting services.

TikTok filed a lawsuit in May challenging the constitutionality of the new law on the grounds that the U.S. government infringed the First Amendment rights of the company and its users in the United States.

In a brief filed to the federal appeals court on July 26, the DOJ raised concerns over the national security threat posed by TikTok, noting that the app collects “vast swaths” of sensitive data from its 170 million U.S. users.

“That collection includes data on users’ precise locations, viewing habits, and private messages—and it even includes data on users’ phone contacts who do not themselves use TikTok,” it stated.

The DOJ argued that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China could potentially use its robust authority to gain access to U.S. consumer data and the algorithm owned by ByteDance.

“Given TikTok’s broad reach within the United States, the capacity for China to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching objectives to undermine American interests creates a national-security threat of immense depth and scale,” it stated.

The DOJ said the Chinese regime could “covertly control” TikTok’s algorithm to influence the content that U.S. users receive “for its own malign purposes,” such as promoting disinformation and exacerbating social divisions.

“Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections,” the DOJ stated.

The DOJ claimed that employees of TikTok and ByteDance often engage in a practice called “heating,” in which certain videos are manually promoted to achieve a certain number of views.

The department warned that this functionality could be “a powerful tool” for manipulating public discourse and public perceptions of events.

The DOJ also accused TikTok of misapplying the First Amendment. It argued that the new law was aimed at “national-security concerns unique to TikTok’s connection to a hostile foreign power, not at any suppression of protected speech.”

“They largely dismiss the divestment option—under which ByteDance’s American affiliate could continue engaging in these activities on the platform—as infeasible, in significant part because TikTok’s U.S. operations are currently interwoven with operations in China and because China will not permit the export of the proprietary recommendation algorithm,” it stated.

A TikTok spokesperson said the DOJ’s brief does not alter “the fact that the Constitution is on our side,” reiterating that the new law would violate the First Amendment by silencing its users’ voices.

“As we’ve said before, the government has never put forth proof of its claims, including when Congress passed this unconstitutional law,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.

“Today, once again, the government is taking this unprecedented step while hiding behind secret information. We remain confident we will prevail in court,” the spokesperson said.

The new law sets the initial deadline for a TikTok sale by January 2025, and President Biden can decide to extend the deadline by another three months to allow the deal to be completed.

TikTok has maintained that it has not and will not share U.S. user data with the CCP. But according to China’s counterespionage law, ByteDance must hand over data on U.S. users if requested.