The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal appeals court late on Friday to uphold an April law requiring China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets by Jan. 19 or face a ban.
The US Justice Department argued in its filing that TikTok under Chinese ownership poses a serious national security threat because of its access to vast personal data of Americans, asserting China can covertly manipulate information that Americans consume via TikTok.
“The serious national-security threat posed by TikTok is real,” the department said. “TikTok provides the Chinese government the means to undermine U.S. national security in two principal ways: data collection and covert content manipulation.”
The Biden administration asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reject lawsuits by TikTok, parent company ByteDance and a group of TikTok creators seeking to block the law that could ban the app used by 170 million Americans.
TikTok, which has repeatedly denied it would ever share U.S. user data with China or that it manipulates video results, did not immediately comment.
The DOJ’s filing details wide-ranging national security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok.
“China’s long-term geopolitical strategy involves developing and pre-positioning assets that it can deploy at opportune moments,” the department said.
The government acknowledged in a separate declaration it had no information that the Chinese government had gained access to the data of U.S. TikTok users but said the risk of the possibility was too great.
“The United States is not required to wait until its foreign adversary takes specific detrimental actions before responding to such a threat,” the filing said.
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The government also filed a classified document with the
court detailing additional security concerns about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok, as well as broader declarations from the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and DOJ’s National Security Division.
ByteDance told the U.S. government that TikTok’s source code contained 2 billion lines of code making a full review impossible. “Oracle estimated it would require three years to review this body of code,” excluding additional changes, DOJ added.
Signed by President Joe Biden on April 24, the law gives ByteDance until Jan. 19 to sell TikTok or face a ban. The White House says it wants to see Chinese-based ownership ended on national security grounds, but not a ban on TikTok.
