Middle Grounds: TikTok Ban

Pro: The US Should Push to Remove Chinese Control of TikTok Due to Concerns of National Security, Privacy, and Public Opinion Influence

Few congressional bills have garnered as much recent attention from Americans of all ages and political affiliations as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” — more commonly referred to as “the TikTok ban.” The bill, which passed the House with an unusually bipartisan 352-65 vote on March 13th, prohibits “distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok).” The United States Congress should continue to push H.R. 7521 to incentivize divestment of TikTok, removing control of the app from ByteDance and the Chinese government. 

To better understand what the bill is, it’s helpful to know what the bill isn’t: H.R. 7521 is not a hard and fast ban on TikTok, nor is it a ploy by the United States government to restrict free speech. Rather, the bill would require the app to disengage from its parent company, ByteDance, within 180 days or be removed from American app stores. Many lawmakers have expressed a desire to make TikTok better through divestment, not to ban the app altogether. The underlying issue being debated in Congress is not free speech, but national security. 

Brendan Carr, commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, recently broke down the implications of the legislation in a post on X: 

• If you’re an individual user, the bill confers zero authority to the government over you.

• The bill only applies to applications controlled by one of four foreign adversary governments previously codified in law by Congress–China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. The bill is clear that it is not enough to merely have operations there or do business there. It must be *controlled* by one of those four governments. 

• Even then, the bill only applies if the application presents a demonstrated and significant threat to national security. Control by one of four foreign governments alone isn’t even enough under the bill.

• And then, only after public process provided and Congress reported to with a description of the specific national security threat.

There has been little consensus on the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) relationship with TikTok. At a hearing earlier this year, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton repeatedly asked TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean with no known personal ties to the CCP, about his nationality. This controversial and frankly unnecessary exchange has distracted from what we do know to be true about the TikTok-China connection. In 2021, the CCP got one of three board seats at ByteDance and invested in the company. The Chinese government has increasingly taken small stakes, known as “golden shares,” giving them board seats, voting power, and a say in business decisions of China-based companies.

To those still questioning whether China does have influence over TikTok, I ask, why is this divestment request effectively a ban? In other words, if China did not have significant stakes in ByteDance, why would Beijing disapprove of a sale so vehemently? China’s TikTok alliance has been noted well before the recent legislation; in March 2023, Chew testified on Capitol Hill and stated that TikTok functions independently of the CCP, but throughout the week of the hearing, the Chinese government devoted significant state resources to defending the app. 

Despite TikTok’s continued efforts to establish itself as separate from ByteDance and the CCP, former TikTok employees have said the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance are nearly nonexistent. ByteDance employees are able to easily access U.S. user data, and TikTok’s privacy policy allows the company to share the data it collects with its corporate group, including ByteDance. While TikTok downplays the importance of this access, Bryan Cunningham of UC Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute has warned that the app could expose users to information requests by the Chinese government. 

American tech companies also collect data, but they have tools to protect users when the U.S. government seeks such data. Chinese companies, on the other hand, must comply with the Chinese government, whose laws show little regard for user privacy and safety. China’s National Intelligence Law, for example, requires Chinese organizations and citizens to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.” 

To many Americans, a lack of privacy is a small price to pay for the endless entertainment and networking opportunities provided by TikTok. Such users are aware of how most of their social media apps collect and track their data, and they don’t really care — or at least they don’t understand the implications of this lack of privacy. TikTok is unique, though, in its ability to influence what its users see and therefore think. NYU Stern Professor Scott Galloway described TikTok as “the most powerful propaganda tool in history.”

TikTok has been known to instruct moderators to censor videos mentioning Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or Falun Gong. An independent research organization of Rutgers University believes that “TikTok is likely manipulating public debate not only on China-specific topics…but also on strategically important topics with less direct ties to China, such as the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.” In 2023, researchers compared the average performance of pop culture hashtags like #TaylorSwift and #CristianoRonaldo, finding there were 2.2 posts on Instagram with such hashtags for every one on TikTok. They concluded this ratio made sense given Instagram’s larger user base, but then they ran a similar analysis for politically charged hashtags. For every TikTok post with a hashtag supporting Ukraine, there were 8.5 such posts on Instagram, perhaps reflecting China’s support of Russia. The numbers for #HongKongProtests were even more alarming, with 206 Instagram posts for every one on TikTok. For topics more friendly to the Chinese government, such as #StandWithKashmir, the numbers flipped, with 661-to-1 greater prevalence on TikTok.

Surely, these numbers are at least partially influenced by the fact that most U.S. social media platforms, including Instagram, are barred in China. Regardless, TikTok has continued to boost certain content — including some touting China’s Covid lockdowns and “tourism” in the Xinjiang region, home to a situation the U.S. government has described as genocide — in ways that may have dangerous outcomes for the 150 million Americans on the app, not to mention the over one billion monthly active users worldwide. 

Lest H.R. 7521 be perceived as a calculated attempt at influencing the upcoming presidential election, the United States is far from the only country concerned with TikTok and its relations with China. NATO, the European Commission, and fourteen countries have prohibited TikTok from being downloaded on their government phones, with some nations banning the app entirely. 

There is clear precedent at the international level, but the United States may find a path forward within its own history, too. Author Michael Sobolik recently wrote, “We have limitations on foreign government ownership of broadcasting companies. That isn’t a First Amendment violation. Why wouldn’t we have (even more precise) limits in the social media sphere as well?” 

TikTok’s integration with China, a declared foreign adversary, its continued mishandling of user data, and its tendency to censor content represent a dire and ever-growing threat to American security. As Sobolik stated succinctly, “In order to protect our political system and liberties from foreign corruption, Washington must sever Beijing’s control over TikTok.” 

• Lucy Newmyer

 

Con: The US Should Not Push to Remove Chinese Control of TikTok Due to Unsubstantiated Privacy Concerns and its Failure to Address Underlying Issues

For a nation so bitterly divided, TikTok seems to unite both sides of the political aisle in either support or opposition. With the recent passage of a federal “ban” in the US House of Representatives, public debate has once again picked up. An executive branch attempt was made to force the sale of the app in 2020- but it was legally dead on arrival. But this time, TikTok truly seems to be on life support.

But first, a couple of steps back. TikTok wasn’t around in 1914 (otherwise World War I might have gone much worse), and it didn’t spring from the earth as some malformed divine punishment. During the rise of the mobile internet in the 2010s, a Chinese firm named ByteDance (founded by a former Microsoft employee) created an app named Douyin. After its immense success in China amounting to tens of millions of users, ByteDance purchased a similar American app named Musical.ly, and adapted it into a new app based on Douyin named TikTok.

The recent Congressional legislation does not totally ban TikTok, effective immediately. Rather, it would demand ByteDance sell the app to another company, so long as this new company isn’t from a “foreign adversary”. The Chinese government, however, must permit such a sale- approval they have stated would not be granted. Since resale would be impossible, if the bill passes, TikTok will almost certainly be banned.

There are generally two criticisms of TikTok to take into account- both heavily intertwined in the popular consciousness. ByteDance is a Chinese company, and in the present day, that is seen as a problem. Anti-China sentiment has been steadily increasing among national security and political officials since the 2010s; however, after 2019 (and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic) this suspicion has fully exploded into mainstream popular opinion. In 2018, 53% of the US populace held a positive opinion of China, and 45% held negative opinions. That favorability rating was in fact the highest it had been since the 1980s. Within 5 years, 77% held negative views, and 15% positive. In the eyes of the American public, China is “the enemy.” This article isn’t going to – and doesn’t need to – agree or disagree with that designation. The fact that this “enemy” designation is then cast down to Chinese corporations and individuals is the real issue at stake in this conversation.

The “adversary” angle is most pronounced in the privacy and data concerns surrounding TikTok. TikTok does collect user information, and a lot of it. User locations, keypad movements, and other deeply personal information is collected from phones on which TikTok is installed. In ByteDance’s Chinese branch, a Chinese government official sits on the board, as the government owns 1% of the company. Furthermore, ByteDance can be compelled, under Chinese law, to provide information to the Chinese government. These arguments contributed to the 2022 ban of the app on US government phones. One common argument that follows is that TikTok either can, or is, feeding the data of Americans to the Chinese government. Some take their allegations further, claiming that trends on the app can be artificially manipulated straight from Beijing, elevating or hiding content based on the desires of the Communist Party.

The more extreme arguments are conspiratorial and unsubstantiated. As of now, no evidence has ever been provided to prove that the data of Americans is being sent to China. In fact, the data collected by TikTok is not particularly unique- other American social media apps  collect very similar amounts of personal information, and haven’t been threatened with bans. According to Citizen Lab’s investigation– a cybersecurity lab focused on analyzing internet security- there is no evidence that TikTok is “overtly malicious”. There is also no clear evidence of politicized search manipulation on TikTok, at least not to the level claimed by the most radical opponents of the app. The suspicion heaped on TikTok is surprising, given the blatant disregard for consumer privacy exhibited by American companies without Congressional outrage.

While TikTok has connections to China through ByteDance, TikTok itself is a subsidiary of the company with its own CEO, Shou Zi Chew, who recently appeared before Congress where he was questioned about his true loyalties by Senator Tom Cotton. Of note, Shou Zi Chew was born, raised, and currently lives in Singapore, and his wife is an American. In a disturbing grilling reminiscent of 19th-century “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, Senator Cotton questioned his citizenship and his loyalties to the Chinese Communist Party. He is a citizen of Singapore, not China- only Chinese citizens can become members of the CCP. However, despite being told multiple times that Chew was Singaporean, Senator Cotton continued to barrage him with questions about his loyalties to China (again, of which he is not a citizen). The only logical explanation is that these “concerns” that have been levied against Mr. Chew are due to his ethnic heritage. Questions like those asked by Senator Cotton have never been directed towards fellow tech CEO Elon Musk, who was born outside of the US. Just because TikTok has ties to China and an Asian CEO does not make it a CCP plant, nor does it justify a hasty ban when all available evidence points to standard and non-insidious usage of collected data. There is a broader argument to be made about data collection regulation, but banning TikTok would dissipate the conversation and allow American tech giants to continue their invasive practices.

The second and more broad argument in favor of banning TikTok, and the one less often publicized but very often used as justification, focuses on the societal impact of the app. While hard to find reputable news articles discussing this idea, anecdotally, many people view TikTok as the origin of certain societal ills. It is quite easy to find breathless reporting on some dangerous or harmful “TikTok trend.” These “trends” often amount to nothing more than smoke. “Osama bin Laden goes viral on TikTok”- a headline many news organizations pushed late last year- refers to less than 300 total videos where his manifesto was referenced, a miniscule sum for the massive app. The fear that TikTok is some societal plague promoting chaos and violence does reflect a rising trend of online influencers harassing and attacking the general public for attention and fame. However, these “influencers” are often not even using TikTok, or could easily switch to other websites and continue their activities. These concerns over “internet culture” are not limited to TikTok, and a ban on the app would just cause online attention seekers to step over to the thousands of websites catered to modern internet audiences.

While concerns about TikTok are rooted in real concerns over major current issues such as internet privacy and online culture, a ban would solve none of these problems. Rather, if lawmakers succeed, they will be able to avoid addressing the underlying issues causing so much concern about the app, letting other – even worse – offenders off the hook.

• Jake Martin