New DOJ Filing: TikTok’s Owner Is ‘A Mouthpiece’ Of Chinese Communist Party

Enlarge this image

Zhang Yiming, chief executive officer and founder of ByteDance Ltd., poses for a photograph in Beijing, China in 2019.

Bloomberg/Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

Bloomberg/Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Technology
U.S. To Bar Downloads Of TikTok, WeChat

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols has scheduled a hearing for 9:30 a.m. Sunday to decide whether the Trump administration’s ban will take effect.

In the submission to the court, Justice Department lawyers say ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is «committed to promoting» the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok has for months distanced itself from its corporate owner, ByteDance, asserting that data on the more than 100 million U.S. users is stored primarily in Virginia, with backup in Singapore.

Technology
TikTok Sues Trump To Block U.S. Ban

But the Trump administration says it has evidence that some data is being transmitted to China, claiming such information can be accessed by Chinese authorities to track Americans and build dossiers that could be deployed for blackmail.

Furthermore, Justice Department officials say ByteDance is beholden to Chinese laws that may require the company to assist in surveillance and intelligence operations at the direction of the Chinese government.

Technology
Trump’s TikTok Deal: What Just Happened And Why Does It Matter?

TikTok strenuously denies it ever has or will in the future cooperate with any demands from China’s authoritarian regime. But the Trump administration said Friday that a recent study showed that 37% of the IP addresses TikTok’s Android users connect to are based in China.

The Trump administration, however, did not offer any direct evidence that TikTok’s U.S. data has ever been assessed by Beijing officials.

The Justice Department filed all of the documents under seal earlier Friday, an unusual move for a government response to a motion for a preliminary injunction. Several hours later, Justice Department lawyers re-filed the documents with a number of sections redacted pertaining to how exactly TikTok allegedly transmits Americans’ data to China.

Enlarge this image

The Justice Department’s federal court filing in response to TikTok’s lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Trump’s ban from taking effect.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia

hide caption

toggle caption

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia

The Justice Department’s federal court filing in response to TikTok’s lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Trump’s ban from taking effect.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia

In another document newly public on Friday that the Trump administration submitted as an attachment to its primary filing, the Commerce Department detailed its concerns with TikTok in an intelligence and security assessment.

Trump officials point to a number of instances that allegedly show that ByteDance has a cozy relationship with Beijing authorities.

ByteDance, according to the document, employs 130 Chinese Communist Party members, who are embedded at ByteDance’s Beijing office.

In June 2018, according to the Commerce Department memo, ByteDance employees organized a party in which they faced a Chinese Communist Party flag, «raised their right hand, clenched their fists, and reiterated their guarantee as a party member and vowed to never betray the party.»

MEMORANDUM for the SECRETARY (PDF)

MEMORANDUM for the SECRETARY (Text)

Trump officials allege that though ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming is not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, he issued a public apology to the government in April 2018 over one of ByteDance’s apps that appeared to have irked authorities. «Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values,» Yiming said then.

In its own filing, TikTok has maintained that U.S. user data never goes to Chinese soil. According to the company, the data on Americans is «sharded» or broken up into unidentifiable bits and stored across many different servers.

Roland Cloutier, TikTok’s global chief security officer, said in a sworn statement to the court that sensitive information like names, birthdays, home addresses phone numbers and contact lists are encrypted.

«It is impossible to decrypt this encrypted user data without a key that has been generated and managed…by our security team in the United States,» Cloutier wrote.

Other revealing details emerged Friday in the Commerce Department memo, including that ByteDance allegedly has spent $1 billion on ads on competing apps Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in order to boost its user base. TikTok has nearly 700 million active monthly users worldwide.

Trump said he gave a deal to save TikTok involving companies Oracle and Walmart his tentative blessing, but an agreement never materialized, as the U.S. firms and ByteDance appear at odds over a number of details, including what firm would hold the largest stake in the new company. TikTok acquisition talks are ongoing.

• ByteDance
• TikTok