TikTok ban? App may be the next casualty of breakdown in US-China trust

ByteDance’s short-video platform is back under scrutiny amid heightened US fears of Chinese surveillance
Whether TikTok’s threat to US national security is real or perceived, it faces an uphill struggle to survive

Chee Yik-wai

Published: 1:00am, 27 Feb 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

The Chinese “spy” balloon incident seems to have erased all positive gains from the G20 meeting between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in Bali, with domestic furore spilling over onto TikTok as calls grow for a complete ban on the Chinese app.

TikTok, already banned from government devices and campuses in almost half of all US states, has over 1 billion users globally, with 94.1 million in the United States alone – roughly 28 per cent of Americans.

Research by my team, led by Dr Nuurrianti Jalli of Northern State University and supported by a grant from a US State Department public policy programme, into TikTok’s impact on young people in Southeast Asia, showed that it can be a highly strategic platform for influencing the consumption of information, with implications for young voters worldwide.

TikTok’s reach is known; US President Biden last year invited TikTok stars to help explain the Inflation Reduction Act and the war in Ukraine to millions of young Americans.

Largely uncontroversial in most countries, Chinese tech success has attracted suspicion and outrage in the US and some of its allies amid geopolitical tensions, with maximum containment often the go-to strategy for the US. Republicans have long voiced concerns over TikTok’s possible role in election interference and called for a complete ban – like with Huawei Technologies.

This is despite US researchers finding that TikTok is not in any way controlled by the Chinese government. The bipartisan US political establishment has long been suspicious of TikTok’s Chinese roots, sensing a threat to Washington’s global leadership in information control, and to US values.

Democrats and Republicans differ, however, in how to cope with TikTok’s rise, for fear of putting off young American voters. Unsurprisingly, after the balloon incident, both sides are more united than ever over TikTok.

A TikTok exhibition stand at the Gamescom fair in Cologne, Germany, on August 25 last year. The European Union’s digital policy chief warned TikTok last month that it would have to fall in line with tough new rules for online platforms set to take effect later this year. Photo: AP

For its part, TikTok has emphasised its purely commercial focus and banned political ads to alleviate concerns about election interference. Yet a recent study on the ability of social media platforms to detect ads featuring misleading or false election information found that TikTok had approved 90 per cent of them.

Although Facebook, which does not permanently ban political ads, also scored very poorly in the study, its American roots means it faces much less scrutiny from the US and its allies. To survive in America, TikTok has to do much better than Facebook in fighting fake news and preventing further political risks.

With US-China tensions so high, TikTok’s innocence, or lack thereof, seems to have become irrelevant, and some have tried to draw comparisons with Huawei. But unlike Huawei, TikTok has received virtually no government aid and has succeeded despite Beijing’s regulatory crackdown on social media companies. For instance, since 2017, the national intelligence law has obliged all companies with information stored within its borders to hand over data at the government’s request.

TikTok was not even ByteDance’s first app. In 2018, Neihan Duanzi, its humour-focused app, was abruptly shut down for breaching censorship guidelines, forcing ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming to apologise for flouting “socialist core values”. ByteDance’s success in such a challenging environment should afford TikTok even greater respect. Yet TikTok’s downfall could come as swiftly as its rise, amid growing controversy worldwide.

02:05

India bans another 118 Chinese apps as border tensions escalate

The nebulousness of its algorithm – which TikTok insists is based on user preferences and behaviours – gives its critics room to claim manipulation and censorship without having to supply strong evidence for it.

TikTok’s mode of operation is vastly different from its mainland Chinese sibling Douyin – which draws in older users, is used by the police to share information and has advanced facial recognition features.

Experts agree that TikTok’s data privacy breaches are not uncommon and even quite restrained compared to those of others such as Facebook. Other US social media giants including Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn have also been caught reading the user clipboard – where data copied across or within applications is temporarily saved – which they claimed was to prevent spamming.

Bill to ban TikTok in US reflects growing concerns in Congress over China

To reassure the US authorities, ByteDance has reiterated that it no longer employs China-based content moderators, and moved its US user data to Oracle.

But recent reports of inappropriate staff access to US TikTok users’ data dealt a deep blow to ByteDance’s reputation and the strongest measures must be taken to ensure this never happens again.

Reports of inappropriate staff access to US TikTok users’ data have dealt a deep blow to ByteDance’s reputation. Photo illustration: Reuters

For decades, tech companies have operated in different markets using different divisions that effectively created information divides. This allowed individual divisions to be shut down if needed, when the environment changed, such as when TikTok left Hong Kong or when Google and Facebook left mainland China.

What made sense a few weeks ago, for the US to explore neutral options for TikTok that possibly involve strong data storage governance and disclosures of its algorithms, now no longer seems to. If TikTok is to survive in the US, the most optimistic outcome might be a mandatory joint venture involving a technology transfer to a home-grown US company. Former president Donald Trump floated the idea, which just may be picked up again by Biden.

US politicians have long complained of “forced technology transfers” by China, and this may be classic payback, while avoiding the outcry from TikTok users in the US that a complete ban would attract.

This is not to say to say that a ban, like in India, is off the table. But unlike the US, India does not preach about freedom of expression to its people.

Chee Yik-wai is a Malaysia-based intercultural specialist and the co-founder of Crowdsukan focusing on sport diplomacy for peace and development