The TikTok ban is ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous
Politicians are its only winners
I don’t personally use TikTok.
My rationale is nothing related to national security: I only have enough time in my life for an unhealthy addiction to one social media platform, and I downloaded Instagram first.
Neither do I live in America. Still, the American government’s ban on TikTok is worrying to me. Why? It needlessly undermines America’s status as an emblem for free speech, disrupts the lives of US content creators (and in total, its 170 million American users), and risks further raising geopolitical tensions.
The ban has just been signed into law by Biden, after strong bipartisan support in Congress (passing 352–65 in the House, and 79–18 in the Senate). In America’s currently hyperpartisan political landscape, that’s practically a unanimous vote.
The law is simple: unless ByteDance sells TikTok to a non-Chinese entity within 9 months, it will be banned.
The rationale behind the law stems from a greater distrust of China. Lawmakers have vocally expressed concerns that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance may be forced to hand over sensitive user data to the Chinese government.
Under Chinese law, “any organisation or citizen” in China must “support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work.” Under this extremely broad law, TikTok may technically be compelled to funnel all data it has on American TikTok users back to the government.
In this way, China may use TikTok as a backdoor intelligence gathering mechanism, such as by uncovering the vulnerabilities of potential spy recruits or blackmail targets, and building holistic profiles of foreign visitors. And even if most of TikTok’s user base consists of underage teens with no classified information right now, they may grow up to be important politicians, business executives, or spies in the future. Consequently, their social media activities could become valuable assets to foreign adversaries.
No evidence
Pretty worrying, right? The issue is that practically all of these risks are hypothetical, with no evidence to back them up.
As Shou Zi Chew categorically stated in a written testimony to the House of Representatives last year:
“TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made.”
TikTok has also made significant strides to address these hypothetical concerns in the past. It has launched a plan, Project Texas, where American users’ data will be stored solely in America with oversight from the American government and third-party companies, such as Oracle.
It’s also based in Los Angeles and Singapore with a five person board of directors, of which three are Americans. Its parent company, ByteDance, is 60% owned by global institutional investors not tied to China, 20% owned by employees around the world, and 20% owned by its founder, a private individual. TikTok has never been available in mainland China, and none of its data is stored there.
Nevertheless, some US politicians deem these measures to be superficial and hollow. But independent studies have also found no evidence of malice. In 2020, The Washington Post and a privacy researcher found that TikTok did not seem to gather any more data than the average mainstream social network. In 2021, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found similar results.
First Amendment rights
Unsurprisingly, TikTok is gearing up to challenge the bill in the courts. An internal memo labels the bill as “a clear violation of [users’] First Amendment Rights”, which protects free speech. Shou Zi Chew has recently proclaimed that ““The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail again.”
And even if ByteDance was willing to sell off TikTok, the sale probably won’t happen. China’s government has classified TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as a sensitive technology that needs official approval to be exported to foreigners. And China has indicated that it won’t give this approval.
Currently, a potential legal battle seems to be TikTok’s, not the government’s, to lose. As Stanford Law School’s Evelyn Douek reasons, “decades of precedent hold that the government can’t ban a form of communication because they don’t like the content on it, even when it involves foreign adversaries.” With the aforementioned lack of evidence about TikTok posing a national security risk, it’s hard for the American government to argue that it has cleared the high constitutional bar needed to justify silencing the speech of American TikTok users.
The law also harms America’s reputation as a global champion for free speech. Since the 1990s, America has been advocating for the internet as an open “global free-trade zone”, advocating for data to flow freely around the web without heavy-handed restrictions. The US State Department has condemned censorship, such as Pakistan and Nigeria’s restrictions on access to Twitter (now X).
As authoritarian regimes continue to restrict their citizens’ internet access, it was expected that America would have stood firmly as the leader of the free internet. But by targeting TikTok, it can no longer claim to be as such.
This risks further exacerbating global geopolitical tensions. As the bill has made its way through Congress, China has sent a preemptive warning, banning app stores from offering apps such as Meta’s Threads and Whatsapp. With the bill now having turned into law, I won’t be surprised if China retaliates in the coming weeks.
A better solution
Also, banning TikTok does nothing to address the root cause of the issue: data concerns.
Social media platforms’ aggressive harvesting and monetising of our data has birthed a thriving data brokerage industry, where our personal data like our interests, friends, and work is shared like street food in a night market.
As I’ve established earlier in the article, TikTok’s practices are no worse than your run-of-the-mill social media platform. That’s not to say that its practices aren’t worrying: they definitely are. But so are the practices of every other social media platform. And even if you still believe that TikTok poses unique risks because of the Chinese government, that doesn’t diminish the risks posed by other platforms.
Fundamentally, this is a social media data privacy issue, not a TikTok issue.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it: “Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters — protecting our data no matter who is collecting it.”
Politicking
Biden has been extremely supportive of the bill, promising to sign it since March.
Yet his presidential campaign started an account on TikTok two months ago, and has posted dozens of videos since. Even after signing the bill into law, his campaign has committed to maintaining its presence on the platform leading up to the election season.
Seemingly, TikTok is a grave threat to national security — but not grave enough to prevent a presidential campaign from using it.
The president’s hypocritical actions leave only one clear conclusion: he doesn’t actually believe that TikTok is a major security risk, he’s just supporting the bill because both parties do.
The only winners from the ban are the politicians, who can finally celebrate a rare moment of bipartisanship, and other social media platforms that can take TikTok’s place — including those with far more dangerous data sharing practices than TikTok. Who loses? TikTok, its 170 million American users, and the wider global community which has to suffer the risks of worsening global geopolitical tensions.
TikTok does pose a national security risk to America. But so do all social media platforms, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
