TikTok Ban: Is TikTok Actually Bad?
TikTok has been thrown into the spotlight for its alleged threat to national security. But is TikTok actually any worse than other social media networks like Facebook?
What is TikTok?
Best known for its goofy dance memes and the dare-like challenges, TikTok is a video streaming and sharing app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. ByteDance acquired a U.S. music-based social network, Music.ly, in November 2017, and adapted it to produce the current version of TikTok. TikTok has since grown rapidly to attract over 500 million users worldwide through its short, funny, addictive (and often absolutely cringe-worthy) videos.
However, even if you are not interested in your own 15-second claim to fame, you might be interested in the recent furore over TikTok. Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that bans TikTok from operating in the U.S. due to national security concerns. Unless the app is sold to an American company by mid-September, the ban could force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their U.S. app stores, and prohibit advertisers from advertising on the platform.
Why is TikTok Getting Banned?
TikTok first came under fire because of the app’s apparent censorship of politically sensitive videos.
Videos mentioning Tiananmen square, Tibetian independence, or the Falun Gong religious group were instructed by moderators to be taken down, while videos relating to the protests in Hong Kong were also virtually non-existent. This fuels suspicions that TikTok comes under undue influence of the Chinese government, which could use the app’s large audience base to further its political agenda.
U.S. lawmakers are especially concerned due to China’s 2017 national intelligence law. Under article 7 of the law, it mandates that all Chinese organizations are to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law.” This suggests that TikTok may be legally bound to share user data with the Chinese intelligence authorities, which raises concerns that it could be used for spying.
In October 2019, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio called for a formal investigation into TikTok, citing “concern with regard to Chinese influence operations” on the social media platform. “There continues to be ample and growing evidence that TikTok’s platform for Western markets, including those in the U.S., is censoring content that is not in line with the Chinese Government and Communist Party directives,” he wrote.
Chuck Schumer, the senate minority leader voiced similar concerns regarding the “national security risks posed by [TikTok’s] growing use in the United States”. “The platform is also a potential target of foreign influence campaigns like those carried out during the 2016 election on US-based social media platforms”, he wrote in a letter along with Republican Senate Tom Cotton. “With over 110m downloads in the US alone, TikTok is a potential counter-intelligence threat we cannot ignore”.
In the same vein, the executive order by Trump rehashed similar arguments regarding censorship, data collection, and disinformation campaigns on the platform.
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
Is TikTok a National Security Threat?
Even before the rise of TikTok, the U.S. is no stranger to data collection and disinformation campaigns. Few companies are more culpable than America’s very own social media site, Facebook.
In 2016, Facebook inappropriately shared the personal data of approximately 87 million Amerians with the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica. Without prior consent from users, the data was used to target political advertisements that swayed the U.S. presidential elections in favor of Donald Trump.
Facebook has also been involved in many other privacy scandals including massive data breaches.
Is TikTok any worse than Facebook or other social media? In April, an anonymous user on Reddit claimed to have successfully reverse engineered the app, and strongly recommended against using TikTok due to its invasive data collection practices.
According to the Reddit post, TikTok allegedly collects:
- Phone hardware information (CPU type, screen dimensions, memory usage, etc)
- Other apps installed
- Network information (IP address, MAC address, WiFi access point name, and router MAC address)
- Jailbreak information, if applicable
- GPS information (if the user had ever location-tagged a post)
These findings were corroborated by the Wall Street Journal’s investigation, which revealed that TikTok transmitted copious amounts of user data to ByteDance servers, including devices’ hardware identifier (MAC address). This tracking technique is banned by Google.
However, apart from the MAC address, TikTok does not collect an unusual amount of data nor does it appear to spy on users. Many apps including Facebook and YouTube collect similar information for user tracking and app optimization.
In fact, TikTok wants to be more transparent than its rivals. It is opening up about its video suggestion algorithm and moderation policies, and challenges competitors to do the same. “Experts can observe our moderation policies in real-time, as well as examine the actual code that drives our algorithms”, CEO Kevin Mayer announced in a blog post.
TikTok denies allegations that it shares information with the Chinese government.
“We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked.”
It states that American user data is stored in the United States and Singapore, and is not subject to Chinese law. Moreover, the C.I.A. concluded in a recent assessment that there is “no evidence” that the Chinese authorities accessed TikTok’s data.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that TikTok does not have a good cybersecurity track record. TikTok was reported to access users’ clipboards inappropriately. Studies have also found that TikTok did not encrypt their traffic appropriately until recently, and had been plagued with security vulnerabilities. This could result in inadvertent information disclosure that threatens user privacy.
Will TikTok Be Banned?
TikTok has been under scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) for over a year now. CFIUS had previously issued an order forcing a Chinese company to sell its stake in the gay dating app, Grindr, citing data privacy as a national security concern. However, the current executive order issued by President Trump departs from the usual process of CFIUS. TikTok contends that the executive order was issued “without any due process” since no evidence has been found to demonstrate improper data sharing with the Chinese government.
Getting banned is nothing new to TikTok. The app is currently banned in India, and was temporarily banned in Indonesia in 2018 due to inappropriate content. Microsoft has been in talks to buy over TikTok in the U.S., but it remains uncertain if the acquisition will be successful.
TikTok certainly yields significant social influence — hundreds of users were galvanized into registering for Trump’s tulsa rally as a prank. But the use of social media for mass action and influence is not unique to TikTok, and neither is its data harvesting practices. As tensions between the U.S. and China escalate, it appears that TikTok may just be a low-hanging fruit for one party to clamour for power over the other.
This story first appeared on https://theechozone.com/2020/08/13/tiktok-ban-is-tiktok-actually-bad/.
