TikTok vs. the Intelligence Community
Justice Department finally gets specific about TikTok's alleged threat — sort of
In a late Friday night court filing, the Justice Department for the first time accused TikTok not of something bad it could do, but did do. “Intelligence reporting further demonstrates that ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to [Chinese government] demands to censor content outside of China,” the filing alleges.
The Justice Department is pretty clearly insinuating here that TikTok has censored non-Chinese content (maybe even American!) on behalf of the Chinese government — an extraordinary move that would justify Washington’s concerns about TikTok’s threat to national security, if true. But there’s no evidence that the censorship demand was targeted at anyone other than Chinese citizens. If you read the sentence carefully, “content outside of China” could simply refer to content produced by Chinese citizens traveling abroad. (I don’t like that either, but we already know China censors its citizens.) It’s also unclear what kind of content was taken down, an important detail because some content, e.g. child abuse, should be taken down. The sentence I quoted is really all we have to go on because the Justice Department redacted the paragraphs before and after it.
This ambiguity is being lost in the deluge of reporting echoing the Justice Department’s allegations. Worst of all, not a single media report includes a copy of the court filing so readers can decide for themselves what to believe. The media clearly has the court filing — they’re quoting from it — but in their arrogance they want you to just Trust Us that we’re paraphrasing it correctly.
When I first launched this newsletter, I said one of my pet peeves was the media’s father-knows-best mentality that prevents them from entrusting readers with the documents they’re reporting on. So with a little help from an attorney, I pulled the 115-page court filing off PACER and have embedded that below so you can come to your own conclusions or even — god forbid — disagree with mine!
I’ll be discussing the contents of the filing and the TikTok case more generally in my subscriber chat below. I hope you’ll join me.
Curious if you guys agree with my analysis here.
I can't help wondering if there would be any discernable difference in the truthiness of page 24, of the Justice Department's brief, between what it now says, and if you were to substitute the words "USA,", or American, for every mention of China or Chinese Communist Party.
Thanks, Ken for posting this document.