TikTok has been secretly collecting American users’ views on abortion, gun control and religion, the Department of Justice has alleged.
The DOJ accused the Chinese-owned social media giant of systematically passing information about its users to Chinese servers “in bulk.”
It leveled the charge in its first response to TikTok taking the government to court in a bid to overturn bipartisan legislation which would force its parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. The law forces ByteDance to sell TikTok’s American operations due to national security concerns over how the app’s content can be manipulated.
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The DOJ accused the app’s owners of using an internal tool called “Lark” to send data about its users’ expressions and beliefs to Chinese servers In bulk,” the New York Times reported.
“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 DOJ wrote in its filing, NYT reported.
And the DOJ accused TikTok of censoring content at the command of the Chinese government, though it stopped short of saying whether that had happened in the U.S.
“Intelligence reporting further demonstrates that ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China,” the DOJ quoted Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, as saying.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that TikTok had tracked and collected data on users who watched LGBTQ content through a dashboard. After the report, the company said it had deleted the dashboard.
TikTok is estimated to be used by over 170 million Americans but would be banned by December if it is not sold by its current owners.
