Justice Dept. Defends TikTok Law That Forces App’s Sale or Ban

The Justice Department argued in a court filing on Friday that TikTok should be required to sell its American operations to resolve national security concerns about its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

In the government’s first detailed response to TikTok’s lawsuit challenging a new U.S. law that could ban the social media app, the Justice Department said measures that TikTok previously offered to address the government’s security concerns — including walling off U.S. user data domestically — were insufficient. The Chinese government could still collect sensitive data on Americans or manipulate content, the agency argued, and it has incentive to misuse the app because of larger geopolitical goals.

The government claimed TikTok and ByteDance had already made decisions about content at China’s direction. In a mostly redacted section of a statement submitted alongside the government’s main filing, Casey Blackburn, an assistant director of national intelligence, said that the app and its parent company have “taken action in response” to Chinese “demands to censor content outside of China.”

“Given TikTok’s broad reach within the United States, the capacity for China to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching objective to undermine American interests creates a national-security threat of immense depth and scale,” the government said in its filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Under the law, any challenges must begin in that court.

If successful in making its case, the government could force the sale or ban of TikTok in the United States, under a landmark law that President Biden signed in April. If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok’s American operations to a non-Chinese owner by mid-January, app stores and web hosting services will be required to stop working with TikTok, a one-two punch devised to cut off the service domestically.

TikTok, which has 170 million U.S. users, sued in May to block the law, arguing that a sale isn’t possible and that a ban will hurt small businesses. The company has also said it offered extraordinary commitments to the U.S. government to address its security concerns, including giving an American company oversight of its algorithm and storing all data domestically. The fight is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court.