The appeals court that upheld a law that could ban TikTok in the United States said the government provided no evidence that China was manipulating content on the platform.
However, the panel of judges wrote in their opinion that evidence that China forced TikTok to manipulate content elsewhere was sufficient to uphold a federal law signed by President Joe Biden that would require TikTok to be sold in the United States to an American company or banned from app stores.
The US District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Friday, in a majority opinion, that the federal law is constitutional.
The law, enacted in April, requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, to divest from the company by January 19 or face a ban in the United States.
TikTok’s Chinese ownership has raised concerns among US officials across political lines about its potential threat to national security.
TikTok’s potential use as a propaganda tool to promote narratives favoring China’s Communist Party has alarmed some members of Congress.
In statements in support of the bill, Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss called TikTok “a tool of censorship and propaganda” for the Chinese Communist Party, while Republican Nebraska Rep. Mike Flood said the app has “been used as a tool of propaganda in our country.”
Nonetheless, the federal appeals court stated in its majority opinion that the government did not present any evidence that China attempted to manipulate content on TikTok in the US.
“The government acknowledges that it lacks specific intelligence that shows the PRC has in the past or is currently coercing TikTok into manipulating content in the United States,” the opinion says, referring to the People’s Republic of China. The government argued in court that ByteDance and TikTok censored content in other countries at China’s request.
The appeals court stated that TikTok “never squarely denies” manipulating content on its platform at China’s request, which it finds “striking” given the intelligence community’s concerns.
The court concluded that Bytedance and TikTok have “a demonstrated history” of manipulating content in other countries, including at China’s request.
“That conclusion rests on more than mere speculation,” the judges wrote in their court decision. “It is the Government’s ‘informed judgment’ to which we give great weight in this context, even in the absence of ‘concrete evidence’ on the likelihood of PRC-directed censorship of TikTok in the United States.”
TikTok asserted in court that its Oracle cloud-hosted “recommendation engine,” or algorithm, is not based in China. The court stated that, while this is correct, ByteDance retains control of TikTok’s source code, including the recommendation engine.
“TikTok is therefore correct to say the recommendation engine ‘is stored in the Oracle cloud,’ but gains nothing by flyspecking the Government’s characterization of the recommendation engine still being in China,” according to the release.
A spokesperson for TikTok told Business Insider that the TikTok ban “was conceived and pushed through based on inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” the company said in a statement.
Like many other social media platforms, TikTok has come under intense scrutiny for its use to influence elections.
Following an investigation by Romania’s defense council, the company announced this week that it had removed three “influence networks” from the app that attempted to influence an election in the country.
This year, the company claims to have removed at least 40 similar influence campaigns.
