After TikTok’s CEO told the American congress he was no communist asset, nor was his company, a court filing by the CCP-owned company proves TikTok is, in fact, nothing but a CCP asset that operates only through CCP approval. In a court filing protesting the passage of a law that would ban the CCP-controlled app, TikTok admitted that due to the Chinese government’s direct control of its company, it couldn’t even legally sell the asset to a non-CCP entity even if they wanted to.
Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said of the filing, “For years, TikTok has asserted its legal and operational independence from the Chinese Communist Party. 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.”
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Excerpt from townhall.com
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.
