Treating Tiktok as a cudgel is wrong

The following appeared in an editorial in The Washington Post:

President Donald Trump has aplansuretomakeplentyof teenagers very unhappy: ban the video-sharing app Tiktok to punish China for its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The Beijing-based company Bytedance purchased what is now Tiktok three years ago, and the platform has since surged in popularity. More than 175 million people in the United States have downloaded it; Generation Z in particular has adopted it as a go-to. Axing the app would deprive Americans of a favorite outlet for free expression — and yet Tiktok’s provenance does pose real privacy risks that should not be ignored. Which is why treating the tool as a geopolitical cudgel rather than engaging in a thoughtful assessment about its role here is exactly the wrong approach.

Tiktok’s connection to China invites legitimate concerns about data mining. Although Tiktok is mostly full of goofy lip-synching and perplexing meme-making, it collects far more than what its users post — from IP addresses to locations to browsing histories. Certainly, allegations of a real-time information pipeline to the Politburo are far-fetched; no evidence exists to show that Tiktok has given information to Chinese authorities so far. But the question is not only what has happened; it’s what could happen. President Xi Jinping’s government does have the ability to demand data of domestic firms, leaving them little option but to comply.

These worries would make it reasonable for the federal government to bar employees from downloading Tiktok, as the military has already done. Today’s meme-making 13-yearold could be tomorrow’s intelligence analyst with a high-level clearance, and it’s possible that a cache of knowledge about young people’s habits could prove useful in future election interference efforts. These questions are precisely those the ongoing national security review of Tiktok should answer.

Tiktok has tried to distance itself from China by pulling out of Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping security law. Yet the White House has signaled that none of these steps will appease it. The point is retribution against another country rather than protection of this one. The U.S. needs a lawful process to evaluate them — or else it only accepts China’s techno-nationalism as its own.