The suit, which was joined by the Federal Trade Commission, said it was aimed at putting an end "to TikTok's unlawful massive-scale invasions of children's privacy."
The search tool would have allowed ByteDance and TikTok employees 'to collect bulk user information based on the user's content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion,' a DOJ official said. The filing did not indicate how or if the data was used.Social media companies, like Meta's Facebook, also ask users to share their religion and other personal information. However the DOJ alleges that TikTok's access to sensitive information could cause geopolitical risks, by allowing the Chinese government to demand ByteDance share U.S. users' data.
DOJ officials also argued against TikTok's First Amendment defense, saying any damage from the law to users' speech freedoms would be 'incidental.'
'Any adverse effects on expression by U.S. persons are indirect and amply justified,' officials said. TikTok creators, they added later, 'have no First Amendment right to TikTok.'
Like everyone else here, TikTok wanted to show off its new AI products . At a press conference, a top executive from its parent company, ByteDance, rolled out a fascinating and unsettling new feature that allows users to create realistic AI avatars that can say and do… pretty much anything in any language.
TikTok said the account of reality TV star Paris Hilton was also targeted, but it was not compromised.Ms Hilton, who has more than 10 million followers on TikTok, is an active user of the platform.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump joined TikTok, despite attempting to ban it on national security grounds during his presidency.
Here in Taiwan, lawmakers say, they do not have the luxury of thinking of TikTok as the only threat. Disinformation reaches Taiwanese internet users on every type of social media, from chat rooms to short videos.
But the most widely used platforms have foreign owners, and TikTok is not the only one. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, operated by publicly traded U.S. companies, are even more popular than TikTok in Taiwan. And Line, a messaging app owned by a Japanese subsidiary of the South Korean internet giant Naver, is commonly used in the country as a news source and way to make payments.
When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on call to make sure the conversation on TikTok stuck to the facts. When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on call to make sure the conversation on TikTok stuck to the facts.
But some worry that this made it easier for pro-China views to spread on TikTok, and that Taiwan’s approach to regulating social media is not robust enough to confront the persistent threat of foreign influence online.
'In the U.S., the target is very clear ' this one platform - but in Taiwan, we don't know where the enemy is,' Ms. Chiu said. 'It's not just a cross-strait issue, but a domestic one.'