A US court will hear arguments Monday in a case that could result in a ban on TikTok in the United States. The legal battle centers around a law passed by Congress that requires TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app within 270 days or face restrictions. The government and some lawmakers argue that TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government and poses a national security threat, citing academic studies and an ownership analysis that suggests ties to Chinese propaganda organs.
Two academic studies argue that TikTok favors Chinese government views, and a new analysis says TikTok's parent firm is entangled with government propaganda organs.That question is at the heart of the legal battle over a law passed by Congress that could result in a ban on the popularcompany in the United States — a clash that will play out in court Monday as each side presents oral arguments in a Washington, D.C., courtroom.
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that under Chinese law, TikTok’s owners are ultimately beholden not to shareholders or their users, but to the Communist Party of China,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement to NBC News. TikTok counters that the information it collects is no different than that gathered by many popular apps, and it says it would never provide data or shape its content at the behest of the Chinese government. And it says the U.S. government also has the ability to demand user data from tech companies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.
“We assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government,” the report said., published last month, researchers created 24 accounts on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and searched for content that is often censored in China, including “Uyghur,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet” and “Tiananmen.
In his affidavit, Blackburn, the U.S. intelligence official, says the U.S. concern about content manipulation “is grounded in the actions ByteDance and TikTok have already taken overseas, and in malign activities in the United States that, while not reliant on ByteDance and TikTok to date, demonstrate its capability and intent to engage in malign foreign influence and theft of sensitive data.”TikTok’s CEO has told Congress his company has no relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
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