TikTok is fighting back against a potential US ban. Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

TikTok urged a federal appeals court on Thursday (15 August) to overturn a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US assets, claiming that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has made factual errors about the popular video-sharing media app’s ties to China. 

Last month, the department’s lawyers said that the app posed a national security risk by allowing China’s Government to collect US citizen’s data and control what content they see on the app. 

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TikTok said the application’s algorithm of content recommendation is stored in the US on cloud servers operated by Oracle. All of the content moderation decisions that affect the US are made in the same country.

“It misstates where sensitive US user data resides – not in China, but in the secure Oracle cloud,” TikTok said. “It admits it has no evidence that China has ever accessed US user data.”

TikTok told the court that banning the application would be taking away the company’s free speech rights. TikTok compared itself to Reuters, opposing the DOJ’s claim that the app’s content curation decisions were “the speech of a foreigner”.

“By the government’s logic, a US newspaper that republishes the content of a foreign publication – Reuters, for example – would lack constitutional protection,” TikTok said.

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Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat on the committee, said he hopes the divestment of TikTok will enable Americans to “continue to use this and other similarly situated platforms without the risk that they are being operated and controlled by our adversaries”.