The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday charged video service TikTok with illegally collecting information about its users’ views on sensitive topics and censoring content at the direction of its China-based parent company. Previously, TikTok filed a lawsuit in the District of Columbia Court of Appeal, demanding to stop enforcing the law, which allows the social network to be blocked if it is not sold.
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We are talking about a law signed by US President Joe Biden on April 24, according to which Beijing-based parent company ByteDance must sell TikTok by January 19, under the threat of blocking the social network in the US if it does not comply with the law.
The information TikTok collects includes data on users based on their views on controversial social issues such as gun control, abortion and religion, the US Department of Justice said. According to the department, this is a strong argument in favor of the fact that the application for creating and sharing short videos poses a threat to US national security.
«Collecting Americans’ data is not a protective activity,” a senior Justice Department official said, explaining the contents of the department’s filing with a federal appeals court, many of which are classified.
In particular, they report that TikTok and ByteDance used an internal web package system called Lark, which allowed video service employees to communicate directly with ByteDance engineers in China. With its help, TikTok employees sent confidential data about US users to China, which was ultimately stored on Chinese servers and was accessible to ByteDance employees, according to the US Department of Justice. Therefore, TikTok’s proposal to store the data of American users on servers located in the United States and owned by Oracle will not ensure their protection, according to the Ministry of Justice.
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of US residents aged 18 to 29 use TikTok. Several billionaires have expressed interest in acquiring TikTok, but ByteDance has said it has no plans to sell its U.S. business. Oral arguments in the case will take place in court in September.