IN A fresh broadside against one of the world’s most popular technology companies,theJusticeDepartment late Friday accused TikTok of harnessing the capability to gather bulk information on users based on views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion and religion. Governmentlawyers wrote indocuments filed to the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company Byte Dance used aninternalweb-suitesystemcalledLarktoenableTikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China. TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about US users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said. One of Lark’s internal search tools, the filing states, permits ByteDance and Tik Tok employees in the US and China to gather information on users’ content or expr ession s , including views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion.Lastyear,theWallStreetJournalreported TikTok hadtracked userswhowatchedLGBTQcontentthrough a dashboard the company said it had since deleted.

 

The new court documents represent the Government’s first major defense in a consequential legal battle over the future of the popular social media platform, which is used by more than 170 million Americans. Under a law signed by President Joe Biden in April, the company could face a ban in a few months if it doesn’t break ties with Byte Dance. Themeasurewaspassedwithbipartisansupportafter lawmakers and administration officials expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force Byte Dance to hand over US userdataorswaypublicopiniontowards Beijing’s interests by manipulating the algorithm that populates users’ feeds. The Justice Department warned, in stark terms, of the potential for what it called “covert content manipulation” by the Chinese government, saying the algorithm could be designed to shape content that users receive.