What was once a popular social media platform for users to create short-term video content has now become a hot topic on the Senate floor.
The House of Representatives passed a bill on March 13 that, if passed by the Senate, would ban TikTok in the United States unless the Beijing-based parent company ByteDance sells its stake to a buyer that the U.S. government signs off on.
The Biden Administration and lawmakers are concerned with the app’s potential national security threats and data privacy risks for the U.S. government and its users. The recent bill, however, raises questions about the merit of the potential risks and the legal and policy implications of an administration targeting a popular free speech outlet.
“We have to ground the debate in evidence as much as possible, and to not allow political considerations to dictate how we approach the issue,” said Matt Perault, the director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “If there is significant national security risk associated with TikTok, then significant remedies are justified. And so the fundamental question is, is there significant risk? The best way to reveal that risk is through an investigation.”
Overview of the TikTok issue
TikTok is a social media app for short-form video content from user-submitted videos. According to a report done by Oxford Economics, there are 170 million active users and 7 million businesses on the app. It also has generated $24 billion to the U.S. economy.
TikTok’s popularity and economic impact has made this bill a hot topic among the U.S. population, especially among young people, putting pressure on the current administration and lawmakers in an election year.
There is currently limited evidence that the Chinese Government has access to TikTok’s data from a former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, who is suing for wrongful termination and alleges that the Chinese Communist Party used TikTok to spy on users.
Remaining concerns over cybersecurity and privacy risks in connection with China prompted the House to speed up legislation under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — requiring the support of two-thirds of the House for passage. The act was passed 352-65 with 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats voting yes, making it a true bipartisan bill. The future of the bill depends on the Democratic-governed Senate.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew responded to the TikTok Ban Bill in a TikTok video: “Over the last few years, we have invested to keep your data safe and our platform free from outside manipulation. We have committed that we will continue to do so.”
According to Michael Daniel, leader of the Cyber Threat Alliance, the potential risks of TikTok are over the application of its data, such as what it collects, where it’s going, who can access it and whether it’s monetized. The wide popularity of the app only exacerbates the potential harm, explaining why this particular social media platform has garnered so much attention.
“The truth is that while I certainly have some concerns about TikTok, its security, and its relationship to the Chinese government, it does strike me that this is really not about TikTok itself,” Daniel said. “It’s embedded in a much broader conversation policy set of issues about how and when we are going to allow the technology from China into the United States? And under what conditions? Are they going to allow technology from the U.S. into China? Is this competition between the U.S. and China going to play out in the technological sphere?”
TikTok’s Privacy Policy offers a comprehensive breakdown of how they use user information, how they share it and other related rights and choices. TikTok does not sell or share users’ personal information to third parties and is committed to maintaining trust with their users.
“ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government,” said Chew at the House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing. “It’s a privacy company. 60% of the company is owned by global institutional investors, 20% is owned by the founder, [and] 20% owned by employees around the world.”
Daniel believes that the U.S. needs national privacy laws that clarify the expectations for how social media platforms and applications manage an individual’s personal data. Moreover, proper ways to inform users on what they are meaningfully or negligently consenting to.
“I think you also need to make some distinctions between what really is data that you care about versus data that you don’t,” Daniel said. “Secure by design effort, how do you actually build applications so that they’re more secure from the ground up so that the end users have greater confidence that there are fewer vulnerabilities and flaws in those applications?”
Social media apps’ impact on users and where TikTok comes in
An important consideration is not only what the U.S. government and lawmakers think about TikTok, but the majority of its users who would be directly affected by this issue. According to Pew Research, about a third of U.S. adults under the age of 30 are regularly using TikTok and adults ages 18-29 are the primary users of the app, majority Gen Z.
Gen Z, having grown up in the digital age, has had plenty of exposure to a variety of apps and platforms that have utilized their personal information and data over the years.
“I’m honestly not worried about my data,” said Jack Murphy, a sophomore political science major and Tik Tok influencer. “I know our government has all of the information on us on all the other platforms so it’s like, ‘What makes a difference?’ And I feel like the really big issue here is the fact that the United States government is not the one controlling the data, and that’s their issue.”
One of the biggest misconceptions about the media’s portrayal of this issue is that the U.S. government and lawmakers don’t wish to ban TikTok in the U.S., but aim to divest the company from ByteDance to a company that the U.S. signs off on. It will be banned, however, if ByteDance refuses to divest.
This important distinction, however, brings into question the merit of the potential risks of TikTok under the ownership of ByteDance. If TikTok were to become fully U.S. owned, would users’ data still be protected, hence raising the same concerns if it were under ByteDance?
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence showed in a declassified 2023 report that U.S. intelligence agencies have enlarged what is “commercially available information” because of the rapid development of technology and can access “sensitive and intimate information” about U.S. persons.
The U.S.-based data broker Acxiom has more than 20,000 servers collecting and analyzing data on about 700 million people around the world, according to a report by the Nato Strategic Communications Centre of Intelligence.
“The head of Sun Microsystems was famously quoted as saying, ‘You have no privacy, get over it,’” Jonathan D. Aronson, a USC professor of communications, said. “Anybody who is intent on finding information about you can. There are enough public databases. There is enough leaking in terms of that. If you don’t want somebody to know something, don’t put your information on the internet.”
A report by the Center for Democracy and Technology also revealed legal loopholes that law enforcement and intelligence agencies use to get information from data brokers that typically require a warrant.
“All of those kinds of things are the policy issues that we need to be talking about,” Daniel said. “I know, they sound kind of dry and boring, but it really actually matters, you know, over the long run. Just as another concrete example, do we want to set some rules, or at least some norms?”
What the future holds for TikTok
TikTok is already banned from all federal and state-issued devices in most states under the Consolidated Appropriations Act and Montana’s ban on TikTok was blocked by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in a preliminary injunction over violations of First Amendment rights for users and business.
“The only thing that changes is who owns the company,” Perault said. “Those specifics will need to be worked out in court, and I think the rigor of the judicial process will be helpful. It’s easy to write an op-ed talking about potential harms. It’s much more difficult to serve five judicial reviews and the intensive scrutiny that comes with judicial review. I think the thing that we would learn in a court process is more about the facts that animate how the government’s thinking about it and the particular speech value that Tik Tok provides.”
Murphy was in the Capitol building when the TikTok bill was being voted on in the House as part of the university’s political science program and had the opportunity to speak to different lawmakers about the app. He learned two major insights: the media is mischaracterizing the TikTok issue, and it is unlikely that the bill will pass in the Senate.
“It’s going to die on the Senate floor because as the Senate is the upper house, there’s a different type of respect between houses and they don’t want to take up a bill from the lower house, in my opinion,” Murphy said. “I think that in the Senate it’s too political to touch as it is an upcoming election year too.”
“It’s very interesting how you have the very far left politicians like Congressman Ro Khanna, for example, and then you have Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene who’s far conservative who both disagree on the fact that they don’t agree that TikTok should be banned. You have just the middle people voting on banning TikTok but then you have the very far ends of the spectrum actually agreeing on something.”
The debate over whether or not the TikTok bill will pass is one component of the debate, but another is when the ban would actually go into effect if it does.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty on how this is going to play out,” Aronson said. “And especially in the timeline, it’s definitely not going to happen tomorrow or anytime soon. If this ban gets passed, [TikTok] is going to challenge that, and there’s going to be back and forth, so it’s definitely not going to be a change tomorrow but it does kind of bring up some important conversations about the politics getting involved in communication platforms like TikTok.”