TikTok is nearing a U.S. ban. Will Canada follow?
Biden signed legislation Wednesday that would force the sale of, or outlaw, social media platform
If TikTok remains in the hands of its Chinese parent company, the social media giant’s days could be numbered in the U.S.
One of the few things American politicians seem to be able to agree on, a TikTok ban has made its way through both the U.S. House and Senate.
The ban was tucked into an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and the bill was signed into law Wednesday morning by President Joe Biden. That has renewed scrutiny on TikTok in Canada after the social media app was removed from government-issued devices nearly a year ago.
Despite those national security concerns, nearly 76 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 24 were on TikTok, according to a 2022 survey from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab.
But another survey, from a Leger poll in March, found that half of Canadians support the TikTok ban down south, with an increasing number of Canadians expressing concerns about their data security.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking at a housing announcement on Wednesday, said he would not comment on the U.S. bill but added that “Canada will continue to look very closely at how we can make sure we’re keeping Canadians safe.”
“We know that the security, the privacy and the data protection of Canadians needs to be a first priority for us,” Trudeau added.
With widespread use among young Canadians, how would a ban in the U.S. affect users up north? And could Canada follow suit with its own ban?
Is the U.S. banning TikTok?
The latest TikTok bill threatens a nationwide ban in an effort to force the sale of the social media platform from the company’s Chinabased parent, ByteDance.
The new legislation, which Biden has signed into law, sets a ninemonth deadline for ByteDance to sell the company, with the possibility of a three-month extension if a sale is in progress.
TikTok said it will wage a legal challenge against what it called an “unconstitutional” effort by Congress.
“We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Steve Mnuchin — treasury secretary under former president Donald Trump — has already said he’s interested in purchasing the social media giant.
American lawmakers claim that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese government and could be forced to provide user data to the government at any time in accordance with China’s National Intelligence Law.
However, the U.S. government hasn’t provided any evidence to back its claims, and TikTok has long denied that it has, or would ever, share user data with Chinese government.
TikTok’s CEO was grilled at a U.S. congressional committee nearly a year ago over national security concerns. Shou Zi Chew told the committee that TikTok’s headquarters are in Los Angeles and in Singapore, with 7,000 employees in the U.S. and that TikTok is not available in China.
How would a ban work?
Divestiture, the forced sale of TikTok being proposed in the U.S., is usually a method of breaking up monopolies under competition and antitrust law, Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in a Digital Society program, said, but that’s not the case with TikTok.
Bednar explained that the fear of TikTok having to hand over its data is real, but that the conversation should instead be focused on cybersecurity and privacy policy.
The proposed ban sets a precedent for governments, Philip Mai — co-director of TMU’s Social Media Lab — warned, setting up the ability for future presidents to ban or force the sale of social media platforms by citing national security concerns.
Even if a ban were to go through in the U.S., Mai said, it could be battled in court for years.
“This is probably going to be litigated for years to come,” he added. “It’s going to buy a lot of new mansions for a lot of lawyers in Washington, D.C. for the next few years.”
Canada deletes TikTok from government-issued devices
The same national security concerns cited in the U.S. sparked a widespread ban of TikTok from federal and provincial governmentissued phones, with Premier Doug Ford going even further, ordering all of his Ontario PC caucus members to remove the application from their personal mobile devices in March 2023.
The Canadian Press reported on March 14 that the federal government had ordered a national security review of the social media app, though Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne later said parents shouldn’t be concerned about their children using TikTok.
But even the government hasn’t cut its TikTok ties completely. Bednar pointed out that the government continued to spend over a million dollars on advertisements in 2022 to 2023 on a social media platform it had wiped from government devices.
Will Canada ban TikTok?
There’s not much appetite in Canada for a widespread ban on TikTok, Mai said, especially as influencers in Canada rely on the popular social media platform for viewership.
If the U.S. were to pass its TikTok ban, Canada is likely to follow suit, Bednar added.
“We’re definitely a follower country,” she said, “And I think it would be difficult for us to rationalize why we’re not following suit when our, when our American neighbour is taking a particular stance.”
But even a Canadian TikTok ban wouldn’t solve the issue of how companies handle, or mishandle, our data, Bednar said, and no major social media platform has ever been completely transparent about who has access to user data.
Even social media platforms that seem innocuous can have “secret vulnerabilities,” she explained, giving the example of how Strava, a fitness app that helps runners track and share their routes, accidentally revealed the location of U.S. military bases in Syria.
The implication of a ban could be that TikTok users are somehow putting Canada’s national security at risk, Bednar added, but data security is a bigger, and separate, issue.
“Really there’s just this problem with privacy and information and who it’s being shared with,” she said.
“Other than the connection to the Chinese government, American social media apps behave in very similar ways when it comes to how greedy they are with data.”
There’s just this problem with privacy and information and who it’s being shared with.
VASS BEDNAR MCMASTER
UNIVERSITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR