In a new attack on one of the biggest tech companies in the world, the Justice Department charged ON late Friday that TikTok had been using its platform to collect user data in bulk based on opinions on contentious social issues like abortion, gun control, and religion.
According to The Associated Press, in documents submitted to the federal appeals court in Washington, US attorneys stated that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, located in Beijing, communicated with ByteDance developers in China directly over an internal web suite system called Lark.
Further, the Federal officials also alleged that TikTok personnel used Lark to communicate sensitive data about American users, which ended up being kept on Chinese servers and available to ByteDance staff there.
According to the lawsuit, ByteDance and TikTok workers in the United States and China are able to obtain information on user emotions and content, including opinions on touchy subjects like religion and abortion, through one of Lark's internal search engines. The Wall Street Journal revealed last year that TikTok has tracked individuals who saw LGBTQ content using a dashboard that the firm claimed to have removed.
With over 170 million users, the social networking platform is in the midst of a massive legal struggle over its future. The government has launched its first significant defence with these new court documents. If the business doesn't sever its connection with ByteDance within a few months, it may be subject to a ban under a bill signed by President Joe Biden in April.
After lawmakers and administration officials voiced fears that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or manipulate public opinion towards Beijing's objectives by altering the algorithm that populates users' feeds, the bill was passed with bipartisan backing.
The Chinese government may be able to manipulate what people see through an algorithm, the Justice Department stated in a severe warning, raising the possibility of "covert content manipulation."
The brief reads, "China could, for example, further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions by directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm."
Justice Department officials are asking the court to allow a classified version of its legal brief, which won't be accessible to the two companies.
The Justice Department further mentioned that another tool caused content to be suppressed based on the inclusion of specific phrases in the redacted version of the court filings. Users of ByteDance in China were subject to certain tool policies; the business has a comparable program called Douyin, which complies with Beijing's stringent censorship regulations.
However, representatives of the Justice Department claimed that TikTok users outside of China might have been subject to other rules. According to officials, TikTok was looking into whether these policies actually existed and if they had ever been applied in the United States in or around 2022.
To justify their mistrust of TikTok's $1.5 billion mitigation plan, Project Texas, which aims to keep user data in the United States on servers owned by the company, federal officials cite the Lark data transfers as evidence.
