TikTok Denies Relations With Chinese Government

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JAKARTA In April, the US House of Representatives (DPR) agreed to ban TikTok if the platform was still under ByteDance. After the ban was issued, TikTok filed an appeal. TikTok does not accept the allegations of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). According to the company, DOJ provided incorrect facts in conveying the case. TikTok also confirmed their data in the US was completely separate from China. This defense was made after DOJ made two major allegations. The first allegation states that the algorithm used by TikTok to control the user feed could be controlled by the Chinese government for political purposes. According to DOJ, reported by Reuters, the Chinese government can present various good things about the country and display poor content about the US. The second allegation states that users' personal data in the US could be submitted to the Chinese government. When denying these two accusations, TikTok confirmed that all user data was not stored or even accessed by the Chinese government. The reason is, content recommendation machines and user data are stored on Oracle-runed cloud servers.

TikTok juga mengatakan pemerintah China tidak bisa ikut campur dalam keputusan moderasi konten karena keputusan yang memengaruhi para pengguna dibuat di AS. Namun, sekeras apa pun usaha TikTok, pemerintah AS masih memaksa proses divestasi. Selama TikTok masih menjadi bagian dari ByteDance, pemerintah AS khawatir bahwa China bisa mengakses dan memata-matai aktivitas warga mereka di aplikasi tersebut. Oleh karena itu, pemerintah tidak mau kalah dan mendesak TikTok untuk berpisah dengan ByteDance.