By EFE
27 Jul 2024, 18:20 PM EDT
The US Department of Justice has accused social media company TikTok of creating a search engine that allowed its employees to gather information on controversial topics in American society, such as abortion, religion and gun control.
That allegation appears in court documents the Justice Department filed late Friday with a federal appeals court in Washington.
According to the Justice Department, both TikTok and its parent company, China’s ByteDance, used an internal communications system called Lark to facilitate direct contact between TikTok employees and ByteDance engineers in China.
Specifically, TikTok staff used Lark to send sensitive data of American users to ByteDance engineers in China, which then stored the information on servers in the Asian giant.
The court document, however, does not specify what happened to that information once it was stored on Chinese servers.
The disclosures came in legal filings that represent the Justice Department’s first significant response to a legal challenge brought by TikTok and ByteDance following the enactment in April of a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face being banned in the United States.
The legislation, which was passed by the US Congress with bipartisan support, gives ByteDance nine months to find an investor from a country that is not considered an “adversary” of Washington and that can acquire TikTok’s operations in the United States. Otherwise, the platform would have to cease its activity in the country.
The legislation gives the president the power to extend that deadline by another 90 days, which would give TikTok up to a year to change ownership.
Lawmakers from both parties and Biden administration officials fear that China could obtain information about American users through ByteDance and use its influence to manipulate public opinion by altering the content users see on the app.
TikTok says it is committed to protecting its users’ data and has argued that banning the social network would violate the right to freedom of expression, protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
In a statement published on X on Saturday, TikTok insisted that banning it would be equivalent to “silencing” the 170 million users who use this social network in the United States.
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