TikTok and its parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the United States on Tuesday claiming it is "unconstitutional" for the government to force the app to be sold by its Chinese owner or be outright banned in the U.S.
In addition to the expected — yet inadequate — arguments as to why TikTok should remain under Chinese ownership and available to American users on First Amendment grounds, the complaint makes a significant admission about how valuable TikTok is to the Chinese Communist Party.
On pages 18 and 19 of the complaint, TikTok's attorneys argue that the app's foundational algorithm can't be passed off to another entity to remain available in the United States...because the Chinese Communist Party won't allow it (emphasis added):
Third, the Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States. Like the United States, China regulates the export of certain technologies originating there. China's export control rules cover "information processing technologies" such as "personal interactive data algorithms." China's official news agency has reported that under these rules, any sale of recommendation algorithms developed by engineers employed by ByteDance subsidiaries, including TikTok, would require a government license. China also enacted an additional export control law that "gives the Chinese government new policy tools and justifications to deny and impose terms on foreign commercial transactions." China adopted these enhanced export control restrictions between August and October 2020, shortly after President Trump's August 6, 2020 and August 14, 2020 executive orders targeting TikTok. By doing so, the Chinese government clearly signaled that it would assert its export control powers with respect to any attempt to sever TikTok's operations from ByteDance, and that any severance would leave TikTok without access to the recommendation engine that has created a unique style and community that cannot be replicated on any other platform today.
TikTok — in press releases, congressional testimony, and elsewhere — has insisted that it is not an asset of the CCP, yet it just admitted that it is literally an asset under the control of the CCP which won't allow TikTok to be severed from its Chinese parent company.
"For years, TikTok has asserted its legal and operational independence from the Chinese Communist Party," reminded Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of "Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance."
"Those promises have proven to be lies," Sobolik told Townhall on Tuesday. "TikTok admitted as much in its federal petition against the law and said what every serious person has known for years: the Chinese Communist Party will not permit a divestment," he continued. "That's not a problem for the American people. That's a problem for TikTok."
😳 @TikTokPolicy literally says it cannot comply with the divestment requirement because “the Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment” of ByteDance’s algorithm.
— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) May 7, 2024
They’re literally making the national security case for the U.S. government. https://t.co/GMgECor9gY pic.twitter.com/Fd4glisxRM