TikTok is a ‘propaganda and misinformation tool’ to influence Americans by ‘pushing specific CCP-chosen content while hiding its source,’ experts say.
About 20 former U.S. national security officials
filed a legal brief in an appellate court on Aug. 2 to defend the divest-or-ban law on TikTok, a video app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
The law,
enacted in April with broad bipartisan support, requires ByteDance to sell TikTok, or the app would be banned in app stores on mobile devices and on web hosting platforms in the United States. The initial deadline for such divestiture is Jan. 19, 2025, and at the U.S. president’s discretion, TikTok may be given an additional three months to complete the transaction.
Within two weeks, TikTok
challenged the new law’s constitutionality, arguing that the U.S. government infringed on the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its users over national security concerns.
In their filing, the former officials, including former attorneys general and intelligence executives, said that TikTok poses a “serious and unique” national security threat to the United States.
These experts argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “direct access” to the data that TikTok collects from its 170 million American users, which is about half of the U.S. population. According to China’s
Counterespionage Law, ByteDance must legally hand over its U.S. user data if authorities request it.
However, the former officials, who mainly worked under Republican administrations, said that TikTok data isn’t the only data set the CCP can exploit.
Major CCP-coordinated hacks have obtained data from hundreds of millions of Americans.
In the 2017 cyberattack of Equifax, a credit monitoring company, members of the Chinese military, formally known as the People’s Liberation Army,
stole the financial data of about 145 million Americans.
The 2018 Marriott hotel data breach that acquired details of about 500 million guests was
traced back to China’s Ministry of State Security, a CCP spy agency. In addition, hackers tied to the CCP
exfiltrated data of more than 20 million federal employees, including those with top-secret clearance, from the Office of Personnel Management in 2015.
“The CCP can exploit this massive trove of sensitive data to power sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that can then be used to identify Americans for intelligence collection, to conduct advanced electronic and human intelligence operations, and may even be weaponized to undermine the political and economic stability of the United States and our allies,” the experts said in their amicus brief.
“The combined national security impact of these hacks—when added to the sensitive social networking, location, and behavioral information on 170 million Americans available to the Chinese government through its direct access to TikTok data—is thus nearly impossible to overstate.”
TikTok has repeatedly maintained that it’s independent from its Chinese parent company. According to TikTok, its U.S. customer data are stored in Virginia and backed up in Singapore, and the company has never shared its U.S. data with the Chinese regime and never will.
To address the data security concern, TikTok rolled out “
Project Texas” in July 2022—a proposal for Texas-based Oracle to store TikTok data and review its code and software.
However, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said during an April Senate floor debate that the project “does not resolve the United States national security concern about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok” because it would “still allow TikTok’s algorithm, source code, and development activities to remain in China” and “under ByteDance control and subject to the Chinese government’s exploitation.”
The experts who filed the amicus brief hold the same view.
“In sum, after months of digging deep into TikTok and its operations, it was clear to key Congressional leaders that TikTok fundamentally functions as an arm of the CCP in both promoting and censoring data in the interests of the CCP,” they stated.
“And because TikTok fails to meaningfully address the national security concerns, Congress was forced to step in and take action.”
In addition to data risks, the amicus brief filers also identified TikTok as a “propaganda and misinformation tool” for the CCP to influence American users by “pushing specific CCP-chosen content while hiding its source.” According to them, the content selection and video recommendation algorithm could both be used to shape American users’ views on issues.
TikTok is the second most popular
platform among U.S. teens, second only to YouTube, and about a third of U.S. adults younger than 30 “regularly get news” from TikTok, Pew Research Center’s surveys show.
In its
challenge of the law, TikTok described legislators’ national security concerns as “speculative” and said such concerns wouldn’t justify the infringement of freedom of speech.
In response, the Department of Justice (DOJ)
said that it would work on a redacted transcript of a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Select Committee and make it available before the oral argument scheduled on Sept. 16.
On June 25, a group of nonprofit organizations filed an amicus brief supporting TikTok’s First Amendment argument.
Separately from the lawsuit TikTok filed against the U.S. government, the DOJ
sued TikTok and ByteDance on Aug. 2 for violating a children’s online privacy law by collecting data on millions of American children under 13. The case filed in a California federal court could incur civil penalties for TikTok up to $51,000 per violation per day, according to Federal Trade Commission rules.
