TikTok: New pressure for a U.S. ban
After several years of threats, TikTok is hitting a wall in the United States, said Alex Barinka and Anna Edgerton in Bloomberg Businessweek. “Bashing” the company seems to be a rare thing that “Republicans and Democrats actually enjoy doing together.” The Trump administration in 2020 demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, spin off or sell the American operations. President Trump never followed up, but last week the Biden administration gave ByteDance a similar ultimatum to choose between a spin-off or a ban. As wariness over Chinese spying intensifies, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) recently referred to TikTok as “millions of Chinese balloons in our phones.” TikTok last summer announced “Project Texas,” in which the American tech firm Oracle would “house all U.S. user data and audit TikTok’s code.” However, national security officials “are not convinced” that Oracle would have “much incentive to flag any suspicious activities” and jeopardize its lucrative TikTok cloud-computing contracts.
Forcing a sale won’t be easy, said Sapna Maheshwari and David McCabe in The New York Times. Sure, owning a “culture-making machine beloved by 100 million Americans and deep-pocketed advertisers” sounds nice, but the price is steep. How many companies have $50 billion lying around? Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft “are likely to shy away” because of the antitrust scrutiny. ByteDance might want to spin off TikTok and pursue an IPO, but the Chinese government would have to approve it. That leaves a nationwide ban on the app, which would create a “public-image issue” for the U.S., said Nitish Pahwa in Slate. Banning a Chinese-owned app while leaving alone American-owned social networks with privacy problems “would encourage accusations of hypocrisy” from authoritarian states. And politically it’s an unpopular move. The youth “really, really love TikTok” and Biden’s ability “to mobilize younger voters” would be weakened “going into 2024 should he cut the app loose.”
The implications of the new edict go beyond TikTok, said Dan Whateley in Business Insider. Any action by the U.S. “could affect some American companies with business functions in China,” such as Apple. China could easily retaliate. It’s ironic that Congress might ban TikTok at the same time it “continues to allow U.S. companies to scoop up Americans’ data and share or sell it with third parties—potentially including China’s government,” said Matt Laslo in Wired. E-isolationism is in vogue, but U.S. tech companies “continue to write their own rules” around Americans’ privacy. Until lawmakers decide to rein in the data brokers, our personal data is still going to make its way to China, whether it’s through TikTok or otherwise.