In filings first submitted on July 28th, the government laid out its defense, making a series of declarations about TikTok’s risks. The claims relied on dozens of pages of redacted classified material. The DOJ insisted it wasn’t “trying to litigate in secret,” but, citing national security concerns, it asked to file the classified material ex parte, meaning only one side (and the panel of judges) would be able to see it.

We obviously don’t know exactly what’s in these documents, but the partially redacted filings give us some hints. They focus largely on the potential that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to hand over the data of US users — or that it could coerce the company into using TikTok’s algorithm to push specific content onto US users.