After shooting down China’s spy balloons in the sky, the government is now setting its sights on TikTok, the popular Chinese app. The White House is backing a new bipartisan bill introduced this week that would allow the federal government to regulate and ban foreign-produced technology deemed a national security risk.
“In terms of foreign technology coming into America, we’ve gotta have a systemic approach to make sure we can ban or prohibit it when necessary,” bill cosponsor Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said.
“I’m particularly concerned about TikTok’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which repeatedly, repeatedly spies on American citizens,” said Sen. John Thune of North Dakota, the Republican cosponsor.
Several politicians are behind multiple efforts to target TikTok in the U.S. More than 30 states have banned it on government devices, while the White House gave government agencies 30 days to make sure the app is not on any federal systems. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has proposed legislation that would ban the app nationwide, while this latest bipartisan effort by Warner and Thune would broaden that power to any foreign tech. But banning TikTok may face major legal challenges even if legislation prevails.
TikTok fears
Critics of the app warn that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
“There is a thing called civil military fusion in China,” cybersecurity expert Morgan Wright explained. “Anything that’s developed information, that is in the hands of the Chinese company, they are required to share that information upon demand with China.”
Fears ramped up with a 2016 law that declared that any Chinese company or citizen must “support, assist, and cooperate” with Chinese intelligence.
ByteDance then tried to convince U.S. lawmakers that there was a firewall between China and U.S. data, claiming that Chinese staff could not access non-Chinese users. But that fell apart when ByteDance fired China-based employees for tracking the TikTok data of U.S. journalists.
In response, and due to U.S. government pressure that began under the Trump administration, ByteDance has poured $1.5 billion into “Project Texas,” which stores U.S. data with American company Oracle.
“They are bending over backwards, I think they are doing actually too much,” said Milton Mueller, director of Georgia Tech’s Internet Governance Project. “They’re literally spending a billion dollars to create some massive data localization initiative in which they essentially are forcing them to use Oracle as their data storage.”
Mueller said ByteDance isn’t the national security threat it’s made out to be, but is just another tech company trying to make a profit, involving plenty of American investors.
“We have to stop associating ownership with national military capabilities,” Mueller said. “If we do that, the whole global economy starts getting divided up into political territories.”
TikTok data
TikTok surpassed one billion active users worldwide back in 2021. It is one of the fastest-growing apps in history. In the U.S., where about 100 million people scroll the app, the average user spends about 90 minutes a day viewing videos.
While many politicians regularly dwell on the data TikTok collects, calling it a risk to national security, Mueller said it’s really no different from any other social media platform.
“I’ve asked this for the last two years, I said, ‘Give me a plausible scenario by which somebody uses TikTok to undermine the security of the U.S.’ I’ve never gotten an answer to that question,” Mueller said.
But for those who see TikTok as a threat, the data is just the start.
“They are taking data from Americans, not keeping it safe. But what worries me more with TikTok is that this could be a propaganda tool,” Warner said.
“It’s not about what they’re doing today, it’s about how they use this information to create the right kinds of algorithms to feed you the information that over time changed your view about something,” Wright said.
Constitutional conundrum
But cutting off Americans from the Chinese tech, as some legislation proposes, is a nonstarter and unconstitutional, according to groups like the ACLU.
They told Congress an outright ban would “limit Americans’ political discussion, artistic expression, free exchange of ideas – and even prevent people from posting cute animal videos and memes.”
And that’s something people from both perspectives have agreed on.
“I think a ban on the app nationwide would be unconstitutional, I think it would be very easy to challenge that on First Amendment grounds and that would not survive the test,” Mueller said.
“Google and Apple, if they said, ‘Hey TikTok, you’re gone,’ that’s probably more realistic, but I don’t know how probable a solution it is to the thing,” Wright said. “I don’t think the government is going to get to that point where they can actually ban it outright in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.”
There’s no timeline yet for when legislation may face a vote in the full House or Senate.
