Justice Department responds to TikTok lawsuit, argues algorithm could allow Chinese government to influence US elections

Allowing TikTok to continue to be operated by its current parent company could allow the Chinese government to covertly influence US elections, the Justice Department said in a court filing late Friday.

In a federal appeals court filing, prosecutors raised concerns that TikTok’s algorithm could be used in a “secret manipulation” campaign to “influence the views of Americans for its own purposes.”

“Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections,” prosecutors wrote. The filing added, “if, for example, the Chinese government were to determine that the outcome of a particular American election as sufficiently important to Chinese interests.”

“Allowing the Chinese government to remain poised to use TikTok to maximum effectiveness at a moment of extreme importance presents an unacceptable threat to national security,” prosecutors wrote.

The filing is in response to a federal lawsuit TikTok brought against the US government in May in an attempt to block a law that could force a nationwide ban of the app. That law, which President Joe Biden signed in April, says that TikTok must find a new owner by mid-January 2025 or it will be banned from the United States entirely.

The filing Friday marks the first time the federal government has responded to the lawsuit. The legal battle could determine whether US security concerns about TikTok’s links to China can trump the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million US users.

In their lawsuit, TikTok and Bytedance say that US law is unconstitutional because it runs afoul of free speech rights and prevents Americans from accessing lawful information.

“For the first time in history,” attorneys for TikTok wrote in the lawsuit, “Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”

The lawsuit follows years of US allegations that TikTok’s ties to China could potentially expose Americans’ personal information to the Chinese government.

The Justice Department now says that TikTok is misapplying the First Amendment. “The statute is aimed at national-security concerns unique to TikTok’s connection to a hostile foreign power, not at any suppression of protected speech,” the DOJ filing reads, adding that ByteDance could sell TikTok to an American affiliate and then the app could run in the US without interruption.

Senior justice officials, in speaking about the filing, said that the Justice Department is concerned about any efforts by the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, to “weaponize technology,” such as apps and software that run on phones used in the US.

One official said those concerns are “compounded when those autocratic nations require and force, as the PRC does, companies under their control to turn over sensitive data to the Chinese government in secret.”

Some department officials have already spoken out about the video app’s security risks, though not in the context of this lawsuit.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco warned against using the app last year, saying that “any company doing business in China for that matter is subject to Chinese national security laws, which requires turning over data to the state, and there is a reason we need to be very concerned.”

“I don’t use TikTok, and I would not advise anyone to do so,” Monaco said.

“TikTok application collects vast swaths of sensitive data from its 170 million U.S. users,” the DOJ filing reads. “That collection includes data on users’ precise locations, viewing habits, and private messages — and it even includes data on users’ phone contacts who do not themselves use TikTok.”

Some of the users that TikTok is gathering data on are teenagers who could become “family members or potential future government employees,” prosecutors wrote.

The Friday filing makes clear that law enforcement officials believe TikTok could – and has in some instances – taken direction from the Chinese government.

Prosecutors wrote that the proprietary algorithm TikTok uses “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.”

Law enforcement officials know of one tool used in China, for example, that allows TikTok to suppress certain content on the app. While it is not believed that the tool has been used within the US, department officials said the existence of that technology has sparked major concerns about whether the app could collect, censor or even promote certain content for American users.

Senior officials also expressed concerns about employees’ abilities to collect bulk information based on a user’s content that discussed issues like gun control, abortion and religion.