I used to be really rooting for TikTok.
In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app under threat of shutting it down, I argued that banning TikTok within the United States would do more harm than good.
Why? Partly because TikTok seemed a convenient scapegoat for the issues – invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive suggestion algorithms – that plagued all the massive social media apps, and partly because I never bought into the argument that the app was a Chinese tool spy hiding in plain sight.
I’m still skeptical about this argument. If the Chinese government desired to spy on Americans through their smartphones, it would not need to make use of TikTok to achieve this. Thanks to non-existent U.S. federal data privacy laws, he was in a position to buy tons of data from an information broker.
I still fear that a TikTok ban could be an enormous gift to US tech giants like Meta and Google, which own TikTok’s biggest competitors – Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – which might further solidify the winners in a market that already has too little competition.
However, over the past few weeks, as bipartisan laws that may force ByteDance to sell TikTok has been moving closer to Congress, I actually have turn into convinced that banning TikTok or forcing its sale is probably idea.
I got here to this position reluctantly. I still imagine that almost all of the arguments against TikTok are based on vague claims of theoretical harm. And I sympathize arguments made by organizations just like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that a TikTok ban would stifle the constitutionally protected speech of American residents and will set a precedent that authoritarian governments world wide could cite to justify censoring online speech they do not like.
But TikTok also made a series of unforced errors that hurt its cause. And the corporate’s lukewarm response to Congress’ latest bill — which included encouraging users to flood their representatives’ offices with indignant calls — could have inadvertently proven critics right, showing that TikTok is each interested and in a position to use its clout to influence Americans’ politicians, When I need.
Alex Haurek, a spokesman for TikTok, defended the corporate’s response, saying that “Americans have a constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and that includes TikTok users asking their members of Congress to vote against a bill that would trample on them.” constitutional right to freedom of speech and, in lots of cases, livelihood.”
TikTok has had 4 years to wash up its act since President Donald J. Trump attempted to force a sale. He could have spent this time achieving radical transparency, proving that he had nothing to cover and that his relationship with ByteDance was as distant and open-ended as he claimed. The company’s leaders could acknowledge and grapple with the tensions inherent in being a Chinese-owned app hosting political speeches within the United States and other democracies, despite the fact that a few of that speech will inevitably veer in the wrong way of the Chinese government I don’t like.
Instead, TikTok bluntly declared transparency when it launched Project Texas, an unconvincing design was intended to allay fears of Chinese espionage by transferring the info of TikTok users from the US to data servers belonging to the American company Oracle. Last yr, he invited reporters to tour a brand new complex he called the Los Angeles Center for Transparency and Accountability some participants described as a neon-lit theme park crammed with defensive corporate messages.
Mr. Haurek, the TikTok spokesman, said the corporate’s transparency efforts, which include allowing third-party audits of the app’s source code, are “unprecedented” and “far ahead of any other company.”
Above all, TikTok has tried to maintain its cool, privately suggesting that anyone who dares to query the corporate’s ties to the Chinese government is engaging in paranoid and possibly racist fear-mongering.
There have indeed been cases where TikTok critics have crossed the road – e.g aggressive questioning which Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, confronted last month during a congressional hearing about his ties to the Chinese Communist Party. (Mr Chew is Singaporean.)
But the corporate also accused xenophobia of well-intentioned skeptics who simply desired to know the way an app owned by a Chinese tech conglomerate could free itself from Chinese influence, given Beijing’s history of meddling in its tech firms. (I’ll always remember the moment a number of years ago when a TikTok executive suggested that I used to be being fanatical about asking whether Mr. Chew – who, importantly, was also ByteDance’s CFO on the time – felt pressured to comply with China’s censorship laws.)
The company also expanded its lobbying activities in Washington and pushed back against transparency in its own activities.
For example, in 2022, ByteDance employees were caught surveilling US journalists reporting on TikTok and collecting data from the reporters’ TikTok app in an try to determine who was leaking internal conversations and documents to them. Several ByteDance employees were fired after the incident got here to light and the corporate claimed it was “improper” motion, but for me the concept that it was an unauthorized operation carried out by a number of rogue employees never passed the smell test .
My colleagues Sapna Maheshwari and Ryan Mac reported last yr that TikTok employees shared U.S. user data on a messaging system often known as Lark that was also utilized by ByteDance’s Chinese employees, despite management’s claims that TikTok was not sharing that data.
This yr, after researchers used TikTok’s data tool to gather details about popular videos related to topics suppressed in China and concluded that videos on topics resembling China’s Uyghur population and protests in Hong Kong were extremely underrepresented in Internet. TikTok in comparison with other social networks – TikTok has quietly restricted the tool fairly than address the criticism.
None of this stuff alone justify a ban on TikTok. And it is true that American tech firms engage in similar practices infrequently.
But fair or not, we now have at all times held foreign-owned businesses to higher standards. This is very true for media firms whose political and cultural influence make them tempting targets for potential interference. (For example, Rupert Murdoch was required to turn into a US citizen before purchasing Fox News as a result of regulations on the time prohibiting foreigners from buying American television stations.)
TikTok is more powerful than any broadcast network due to its enormous size – 170 million Americans use it – and the stickiness of its algorithms. With his response to Congress’ actions this week, he has proven that he is willing to throw within the towel to get what he wants.
Will TikTok actually get banned? Hard to say. The Senate still must pass the forced sale bill, and President Biden must sign it. It will then must survive court challenges. ByteDance, for which selling TikTok is an absolute last resort, is already signaling that it intends to put in full-fledged legal battle to forestall this. And, in fact, the ban might be reversed if Trump — who abandoned TikTok and now says he doesn’t support forcing the app to sell — is elected in November.
Watching TikTok fight for its life over the past few weeks, using the identical obfuscation and distraction techniques which have disturbed critics for years has been deeply disheartening. Like many Americans, I exploit TikTok every day, and I desired to defend my favorite time-wasting app from threats to its existence.
But a shady company should be held to a better standard, and to this point TikTok has didn’t persuade critics that it has sufficiently separated itself from its Chinese owner.
If it manages to avoid a forced sale, or if the account is blocked by a court, the corporate should consider itself lucky and get to work on increasing the true, verifiable distance between itself and ByteDance to boost its claim to independence. reliable.
And if TikTok is forced to sell, it is going to only be guilty of its mistakes.
