TikTok’s security threats go beyond the scope of the House legislation

In a capital where Republicans and Democrats agree on virtually nothing, it was notable when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly declared on Wednesday that TikTok poses such a grave risk to national security that it should be forced to impose a non-governmental order on its U.S. operations. -Chinese owner to sell.

But that glosses over the deeper TikTok safety problem, which the legislation doesn’t fully address. In the four years that this battle has lasted, it has become clear that TikTok’s security threat has much less to do with who owns it than with who writes the code and algorithms that power TikTok.

These algorithms, which determine how TikTok views its users and gives them more of what they want, are the magic sauce of an app that 170 million Americans now have on their phones. That’s half the country.

But TikTok doesn’t own those algorithms; they were developed by engineers working for Chinese parent company ByteDance, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs. But China has issued regulations that appear intended to require a government review before ByteDance’s algorithms can be licensed to outsiders. Few expect these licenses to be issued – meaning selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code could be like selling a Ferrari without its famous engine.

The bill would require a new Western-owned TikTok to be cut off from any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation regarding the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” So the new American-based company would have to develop its own made-in-America algorithm. Maybe that would work, or maybe it would flop. But a version of TikTok without the classic algorithm could quickly become useless for users and worthless for investors.

And right now, China has no reason to give in.

The vote in the House of Representatives “was a nice symbolic gesture,” James A. Lewis, who directs the cyber research program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Wednesday. “But the Chinese also get a voice.”

It’s all part of a broader standoff between the world’s two most powerful technological superpowers. The sparring plays out every day, including in President Biden’s refusal to sell China the most advanced computer chips and in China’s objections to a forced sale of one of the most successful consumer apps in history. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday that Washington “resorted to hegemonic moves when it could not succeed in fair competition.”

It’s a notable problem, one we didn’t envision when TikTok first released its app in 2016. At the time, Washington was focused on other problems from Beijing. It accused Chinese intelligence services of purging the Office of Personnel Management and stealing the security data of more than 22 million U.S. government officials and contractors. It continued to suffer from the cyber theft of US chip designs, jet engine technology and the F-35 fighter.

No one considered the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that seemed to understand the mindset of American consumers better than the Americans themselves. By the millions, Americans started putting Chinese-designed software, the insides of which no one really understood, on their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for memes and now for news.

It was the first Chinese-designed consumer software program to go wildly viral in the United States. No American firm seemed able to replace it. And so it didn’t take long for its ubiquity to raise concerns about whether the Chinese government could use the data collected by TikTok to track the habits and tastes of American citizens. In a panic, state governments across the United States began banning the app on state phones. So did the army.

But officials know they can’t wrest it away from regular users — which is why the threat to ban TikTok, especially in an election year, is somewhat ridiculous. In a fit of remarkable candor, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said: told Bloomberg last year that if a democracy thinks it can ban the app outright, “the politician in me thinks you will literally lose every voter under the age of 35 forever.”

The bill passed on Wednesday keeps open the threat of such a ban. But that’s probably not the real intention. Rather, it is intended to give the United States a position of power to force a sale. And for two years, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive body that reviews corporate deals that could endanger national security, has been quietly trying to work out a settlement that could prevent a real showdown. So far it has failed – one of the reasons the bill passed.

In the course of those negotiations, TikTok has proposed continuing U.S. operations — while still fully owned by ByteDance — and having its algorithm inspected and parsed in the United States. It’s part of a broader plan that TikTok calls Project Texas.

Under Project Texas, all TikTok user data from the US would be stored on domestic servers operated by Oracle, the cloud computing company. To build confidence in the independence of its algorithm, TikTok has also proposed that Oracle and a third party will review the source code to ensure it has not been manipulated.

TikTok says much of this plan is already being implemented. But government officials insist it’s difficult to know how such inspections would actually work — even for the most experienced experts, reviewing small code changes at high speed is a complicated affair. Biden administration officials say it is not the same as inspecting agricultural goods or counting weapons under an arms treaty. Very subtle changes can change the news being delivered, whether it is about a presidential election or Chinese action against Taiwan.

TikTok has sought to cement that arrangement in a formal agreement to resolve the government’s national security concerns. But that idea was met with resistance from senior Biden administration officials, starting with Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who felt it was not tight enough to address their concerns.

Instead, the Biden administration and lawmakers have pushed for ByteDance to sell TikTok. Sen. Mark Warner, the tech-savvy Virginia Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee and supports the new bill, said any sales of the app should ensure that the “algorithm does not persist in Beijing or be replaced by an algorithm ‘. that is completely independent of the algorithm that is in Beijing.” It also had to protect the security of TikTok’s data, he said.

But in the House of Representatives, it was difficult to know what lawmakers were most concerned about: privacy, the potential for disinformation, or simply the idea that Chinese-developed code was in Americans’ (largely Chinese-made) iPhones. All these concerns were often confused.

“Foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party pose the greatest national threat of our time,” Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Washington Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, said during House debate on the bill. She called TikTok a “valuable propaganda tool that the CCP can exploit.”

TikTok may not have allayed those concerns with the way it lobbied to reject the House bill. Ms. McMorris Rodgers noted that TikTok had used an alert in its app to urge users to contact Congress and push for a “no” vote. Congressional offices were overwhelmed by the calls, some of which staff said were from teenagers. For TikTok executives, this was democracy in action. For some in Congress, it proved their point.

“This is just a small taste of how the CCP is weaponizing applications it controls to manipulate tens of millions of people to further its agenda,” she said.

David McCabe contributed reporting from New York.