The Justice Department this week determined in an opinion that a federal law banning TikTok from government devices no longer applies to the social video app after the United States created its own version with non-Chinese investors.

The deal for a U.S. TikTok was reached in January and is funded by the software giant Oracle, the Emirati investment firm MGX, and the California-based private equity fund Silver Lake. TikTok’s former operations head, Adam Presser, is its CEO.

The new version was created after Congress passed a law in 2022 that banned TikTok from federal devices over national security concerns. Congress last year also ordered TikTok to divest or sell its operations over the potential threat of Chinese manipulation to the social media app’s algorithm.

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said Thursday in a 12-page opinion addressed to the deputy counsel to the president, that the ban on federal devices is no longer relevant to the version of TikTok currently available in the U.S.

"The version of TikTok operated by the TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture does not fall within the prohibition because the Joint Venture functions independently of ByteDance, is majority-owned by American investors, and has revised the content-recommendation algorithm and cybersecurity program originally developed by ByteDance to insulate federal government information against the concerning security features that initially motivated the prohibition," the DOJ said.

The office noted that it is still up to individual federal agencies to determine whether they will lift the ban for management reasons, such as impacting employee productivity.

"This conclusion only confers on agencies the discretion to permit employees to use TikTok USDS on their government devices; there is no mandate that agencies exercise that discretion in any particular way in any or all cases," the opinion concluded. 

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.