July 27 (UPI) — The Chinese Communist Party-affiliated TikTok owner ByteDance could secretly influence U.S. elections and undermine democracy, federal attorneys said in a legal filing.
Department of Justice attorneys in an appellate court filing Friday said China could use TikTok’s algorithm to secretly manipulate what users can and cannot see to influence how U.S. citizens view particular candidates and policies to better serve China’s interests.
Allowing TikTok’s U.S. operations to remain with its current owner “would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections,” the federal attorneys argue.
The current ownership arrangement could enable the Chinese Communist Party to interfere with the election process if it “were to determine that the outcome of a particular American election” is “important to Chinese interests.”
Federal attorneys say TikTok and ByteDance use a program called Lark to collect information on users and store it on computers in China.
TikTok and ByteDance employees in the United States and China can cull information regarding specific users’ content and comments, including their views on abortion, religion and other sensitive topics.
The Wall Street Journal in 2023 published a story saying TikTok used a special dashboard to track users who viewed LGBTQ-related content
President Joe Biden in April signed into law a measure requiring ByteDance to sell its TikTok operations in the United States by Jan.19 or be banned.
TikTok filed a legal action saying the law violates the First Amendment.
TikTok has 170 million users in the United States who spend an average of 1.5 hours on the social media platform every day.
About a third of TikTok users in the United States say they regularly use TikTok to get news updates, the Pew Research Center reported on Jan. 31.
ByteDance initially launched TikTok as a Chinese social media platform but went global in 2018.