The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the US last month not only damaged relations between Beijing and Washington, but also clouded the future of TikTok.
Last week, a US congressional committee backed legislation that would give the US president the power to ban the Chinese-owned social video app. The committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, said the incident had reinforced fears of Chinese state surveillance, describing TikTok as a “spy balloon on your phone.”
arrived days later canada announced would join the US in banning TikTok on government mobile devices due to security concerns. The executive arm of the EU and the European Parliament also banned the app on staff phones.
TikTok faces the threat of these narrow bans intensifying. Banning the app entirely would leave a huge gap in social media consumption in the US alone, where TikTok has more than 100 million users. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was ambivalent about going any further. “This may be the first step, this may be the only step we have to take,” he said.
McCaul’s bill has a long way to go before becoming law, requiring the passage of both legislative bodies in Congress before reaching Joe Biden, but it joins other bills with similar goals. In the Senate, Republican Josh Hawley has introduced legislation to ban TikTok nationwide, while fellow Republican Senator Marco Rubio is behind it. similar legislation. The US ban on TikTok on federal devices follows similar measures by a number of states, including Texas, South Dakota and Virginia that prohibited state employees from using the app on their government-provided devices.
Free speech groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are on the alert for efforts to ban TikTok’s progress, arguing that it would violate First Amendment rights. McCaul’s bill, which moved faster than the ACLU anticipated, is also too broad and would impose penalties on any company that may be directly or indirectly “subject to Chinese influence,” according to Jenna Leventoff, senior counsel. ACLU Policy. That could “connect with a lot of companies outside of TikTok,” she said.
It’s unclear how a US-wide TikTok ban would be implemented and the bill provides few guidelines or limitations. “It means they can do what they think they need to do to prevent citizens from engaging with a company that meets the relevant criteria,” Leventoff said.
The text of McCaul’s bill quotes Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, as warning that TikTok’s parent company is “controlled by the Chinese government.” He said the Chinese state can influence people by manipulating the algorithm that selects what people see on TikTok, as well as giving the government the opportunity to collect user data for “traditional spying operations.”
TikTok has denied that the Chinese state accesses its data, or algorithm. Last year it was reported that US tech company Oracle had begun auditing TikTok’s content moderation algorithms and models to ensure they were not being manipulated by Chinese authorities.
Despite long-standing skepticism about TikTok’s independence from the Chinese state, no hard evidence has been produced to show that there has been state access to its user data or the app’s algorithm. However, TikTok’s credibility was damaged last year when its parent company, ByteDance, admitted that employees had tried to use the app to spy on reporters as part of a leak investigation. As a result, four staff members were laid off.
But Leventoff argues that the collection and sharing of user data isn’t just a TikTok problem; it’s an industry-wide problem, and one that requires an industry-wide solution, such as a federal data privacy law, which the US does not currently have.
The committee vote and phone bans took place in the context of an investigation into TikTok by the US foreign investment committee. [CFIUS]which reviews investments by foreign entities in US companies.
TikTok believes it had a general agreement with CFIUS. Its key components are: TikTok will store American user data in the US on servers managed by Oracle; Oracle will monitor TikTok’s algorithms and source code; Oracle will review app updates and deliver them to the Google and Apple app stores; and TikTok will create a board of security experts that will oversee its US operations and report to the US government.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “We have been two years and $1.5 billion [£1.25bn] delve into a project to go beyond the existing law to secure the US version of the TikTok platform. The fastest and most comprehensive way to address national security concerns is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked on with them for nearly two years.”
However, the process appears to be in limbo as it awaits approval from the White House, in the shadow of a surveillance balloon.
“The Oracle deal would mitigate any risk and work, but it has an uphill battle to win political acceptance,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank.
In the UK, the head of spy agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said last year that he would not worry if his children used TikTok. However, a group of Conservative politicians, including former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith MP, have urged Downing Street and top ministers to shut down their TikTok accounts after parliament closed its own account in August last year following a campaign of lobbying.
Duncan Smith said TikTok should be banned from government devices and ministers’ personal phones because the app is a “threat” and a “data collector”. Citing China’s 2017 national intelligence law, which states that all organizations and citizens must cooperate with national intelligence efforts, he added: “Chinese companies must support Chinese intelligence services when necessary.”
However, Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has ruled out a UK ban. speaking to political this week, he said: “We have no evidence to suggest that there is a need to ban people from using TikTok. That would be a very, very straightforward move… that would require a significant evidence base to be able to do that.”
