‘TikTok is a threat to national security and consumer privacy,’ say state attorneys general.
A bipartisan group of over 50 lawmakers and more than 20 states on Aug. 2 submitted their support for the Justice Department’s efforts to enforce a law mandating that China-based ByteDance divest its U.S. TikTok assets or face a ban. The ban is currently not in force following a court challenge by TikTok.
Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the chair and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led the
filing of an amicus brief against TikTok’s legal challenges.
“TikTok is a threat to national security and consumer privacy,” the state attorneys general of Montana and Virginia said in another
amicus brief for the case.
The lawmakers raised concerns that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is a Chinese firm subject to Chinese law, which requires it to turn over data collected through TikTok to monitor American users.
“The Chinese Communist Party…exercises overwhelming influence over ByteDance. TikTok is a valuable tool for conducting corporate and international espionage, and it may allow the Chinese Communist Party to track the real-time locations of public officials, journalists, and other individuals adverse to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests.”
“Allowing TikTok to operate in the United States without severing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposes Americans to the risk of the Chinese Communist Party accessing and exploiting their data.”
TikTok said in a statement that “these filings ignore the fact that Congress passed the TikTok ban with no record supporting the government’s claims. Moreover, these filings do nothing to change the fact that the Constitution is on our side as the TikTok ban would violate the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans who use TikTok.”
In April, President Joe Biden
signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications
Act (Divestiture Act) into law as a part of the foreign aid package. The law will ban U.S. app stores and web-hosting services from hosting TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, divests its U.S. assets. Earlier this year, the House
passed a similar version of the bill, which was introduced by leaders of the Select Committee on the CCP.
In May, TikTok
filed a lawsuit in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, challenging the law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the U.S. government’s order violates the free speech rights of the company and its users in the United States.
In their supporting
brief, the lawmakers said the law “does not regulate speech or require any social media company to stop operating in the United States. The Divestiture Act is instead focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control and provides a clear path for affected companies to resolve the national security threats posed by their current ownership structures.”
Supporters of the brief also include House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and over 40 members of Congress, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and six other U.S. senators.
Some security analysts have also submitted an
amicus brief supporting the DOJ’s divestment efforts for the weaponizable Chinese-owned app that could subject U.S. citizens to invasive surveillance, censorship, and CCP propaganda.
Last week, the DOJ
asked the appeal court to reject the TikTok lawsuit. The DOJ
argued that the China-owned app poses two-fold threats to U.S. national security by collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million U.S. users and leaving an avenue for the Chinese regime to “covertly control” TikTok’s algorithm and what U.S. users can view, including promoting disinformation and content that exacerbates social divisions in the United States.
“The application employs a proprietary algorithm, based in China, to determine which videos are delivered to users. That algorithm can be manually manipulated, and its location in China would permit the Chinese government to covertly control the algorithm—and thus secretly shape the content that American users receive—for its own malign purposes,” the DOJ stated.
The DOJ
warned, “Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections.”
The annual threats
assessment from the U.S. intelligence community, published in February, found that during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022, Beijing’s propaganda arm used TikTok accounts to target candidates from both political parties.
The new law sets the initial deadline for a TikTok sale by January 2025, and President Biden can decide to extend that deadline by another three months to allow a deal to be completed.
TikTok has claimed that it has not and will not
share U.S. user data with Beijing. However, according to China’s
counterespionage law, all companies in China, no matter if public or private like ByteDance, must hand over user data to the state if requested.
Congress
has banned TikTok from federal government devices due to bipartisan concerns about national security and data privacy. Similarly, nearly 40 states have also
prohibited TikTok on government devices.
In May 2023, Montana
became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning TikTok, citing national security concerns and the app’s data collection practices. This law, which was set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2024, faced legal challenges from TikTok and a group of its users, who argued that the app ban violated their First Amendment rights, among other legal issues. As a result, a U.S. District Court judge granted a preliminary injunction to stop the law from taking effect while the case proceeds through court.
In a separate move, the
DOJ filed a lawsuit against TikTok and ByteDance on Aug. 2 for allegedly violating child privacy laws.
Aldgra Fredly and Reuters contributed to this report.
