Tennessee lawmakers and the Tennessee Attorney General are putting extra pressure on TikTok in the wake of a report that showed some of its employees stole data from American journalists.
The popular app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and has been a center of controversy for months on data safety concerns. Officials, including FBI director Chris Wray, have warned lawmakers that the app could be used to steal personal information, creating a national security concern.
Those concerns earned bans on the app from devices used by the White House, U.S. defense agencies, and the U.S. Senate. In December, Tennessee joined 18 other states to ban the app for state uses in some way. Here, the app is banned from all state-owned devices.
In December, TikTok admitted that four of its employees accessed and stole information from U.S. journalists. Those employees were promptly fired, and TikTok maintains its app is secure and poses no threat to U.S. national security. But the report ramped up suspicions about the service and calls for it to be banned.
Last week, Tennessee House members passed a bill that would ban TikTok and WeChat, a Chinese instant messaging service, on public university wifi networks. The bill would deny access to any platform operated or hosted by a company in the People’s Republic of China to anyone — students, faculty, staff, or the public — on those university networks.
In his presentations on the bill, Sen. John Lundberg (R-Bristol) did not explicitly state that China could use the apps to access university data. But he called them a “security threat.”
“We do not need to provide access [to the apps] on our university websites for that because our universities are conducting a great deal of research,” he said.
As an example, Lundberg noted that Senate Speaker Sen. Randy McNally’s [R-Oak Ridge] district is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The facility is owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Energy, working on topics from artificial intelligence to nuclear energy. Lundberg said the facility has a partnership with the University of Tennessee and suggested that by “the amount of information that is collected, we do not need to open that door.”
A House committee is set to review the bill soon.
Meanwhile, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti believes TikTok may be in violation of state consumer protection laws. He said the social media site may be providing and promoting its platform to minors, children, and young adults here, “causing profound harms to these vulnerable users.”
“We are asking the court to order TikTok to preserve and produce evidence for our investigation into social media’s impact on children’s mental health,” General Skrmetti said. “In light of the urgent importance of this issue, TikTok’s obstruction is unconscionable. If TikTok continues to flout the law, the state attorneys general have the tools to respond accordingly.”
On Monday, Skrmetti filed a motion to force TikTok to preserve documents and produce internal messages in a request-for-information motion served on the company by the AG’s office nearly a year ago.
He said the company’s lawyers confirmed that TikTok allowed its employees to keep active a feature on its internal communication network, Lark, to delete messages within seven days. Skrmetti said this increases the chances that employees have deleted information relevant to the the AG’s investigation.
For this and more, Skrmetti said the company “has engaged in a pattern of delay” in the investigation and filed a motion for the court to hold regular status conferences with all parties.
