TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance has spent years negotiating a national security agreement with the Biden Administration that would avoid a ban on the short video app in the United States. Now, a draft of that agreement from summer 2022 reveals just how much control ByteDance may have to give the U.S. government. Were it to be finalized, the agreement would provide the government near unfettered access to internal TikTok information and unprecedented control over essential functions that it does not have over any other major free speech platform.
The document, nearly 100 pages long, is designated as a confidential attorneys’ draft and contains comment exchanges between lawyers for ByteDance and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a group of federal agencies that investigates foreign investment in business deals that could threaten national interests.
The draft agreement, as it was being negotiated at the time, would give government agencies like the DOJ or the DOD the authority to:
- Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
- Block changes to the app’s U.S. terms of service, moderation policies and privacy policy,
- Veto the hiring of any executive involved in leading TikTok’s U.S. Data Security org,
- Order TikTok and ByteDance to pay for and subject themselves to various audits, assessments and other reports on the security of TikTok’s U.S. functions, and,
- In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.