The Justice Department is asking a federal appeals court to reject the Chinese company’s attempt to block legislation that would force it to sell off the wildly popular video-sharing site TikTok, accusing it of collecting U.S. user data on topics including abortion, gun control and religion.
Prosecutors argued in documents filed late Friday that the social media giant’s ability to collect information based on users’ opinions on such divisive issues could pose a significant threat to national security.
Justice Department officials charged that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, used an internal web suite system called Lark that allowed the platform’s employees to communicate directly with Beijing-based ByteDance.
The documents, filed Friday in a federal appeals court in Washington, are the Biden administration’s first response to a lawsuit filed by ByteDance, TikTok and a group of TikTok creators challenging the “Act on Protecting Americans from Restricted Applications by Foreign Adversaries.”
The bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden in April requires ByteDance to sell its ownership interest in the U.S. version of TikTok within a year, or the social media platform could be banned in the United States.
TikTok and its parent company filed a lawsuit in May, arguing that the law is unconstitutional.
“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted legislation to permanently ban a single, specific speech platform nationwide, barring all Americans from participating in a unique online community that reaches more than one billion people worldwide,” the company’s lawyers wrote.
In a filing on Friday, the Justice Department wrote that TikTok’s algorithms could be used to influence the opinions of U.S. users.
“Among other things, this would enable foreign governments to unlawfully interfere in our political system and political debate, including our elections,” prosecutors wrote in the filing, according to CNN.
“Allowing the Chinese government to remain poised to exploit TikTok at this critical moment poses an unacceptable threat to our national security,” the document said.
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I thought it was about time I got involved!
♬ Original Sound – Kamala Harris
News of the lawsuit broke just a day after Vice President Kamala Harris officially joined the meme-generating platform.
“I thought it was about time,” the Democratic presidential candidate and TikTok sensation captioned her first video on the site.
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