TikTok is its own worst enemy
I was really rooting for TikTok.
When the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the app or risk its closure in 2020, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than would do well.
Why? Partly because TikTok seemed like a convenient scapegoat for problems — invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive recommendation algorithms — that plagued all major social media apps, and partly because I never bought the argument that the app was a Chinese spy tool operating in clear view.
I’m still skeptical of that argument. If the Chinese government wanted to spy on Americans through their smartphones, it wouldn’t have to use TikTok to do so. It could buy large amounts of information from a data broker, thanks to non-existent US federal data privacy laws.
And I still worry that banning TikTok would be a huge gift to US tech giants like Meta and Google, which own TikTok’s biggest competitors – Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – allowing the winners to further entrench themselves in a market which already has too little competition.
But in recent weeks, as a bipartisan bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok hurtled toward congressional approval, I’ve come to think that banning TikTok, or forcing its sale, would probably be a good thing. idea is.
I found myself in this position reluctantly. I still think much of the anti-TikTok case is based on vague claims about theoretical harm. And I feel sorry for arguments organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have argued that banning TikTok would suppress the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and could set a precedent that authoritarian governments around the world could cite to censor online speech they don’t to justify liking.
But TikTok has also made a series of unforced errors that have hurt its business. And the company’s clumsy response to the latest congressional bill — including encouraging users to flood their representatives’ offices with angry phone calls — may have inadvertently proven the critics right, by showing that TikTok is both interested in and capable of is to use its power to influence American politics whenever it wants.
Alex Haurek, a spokesperson for TikTok, defended the company’s response, saying that “Americans have a constitutional right to ask the government for redress of their complaints, and that includes TikTok users asking their members of Congress to to vote against a bill that would trample on their constitutional right to injustice. freedom of expression and, in many cases, their livelihood.”
TikTok has had four years to clean up its act since President Donald J. Trump led an effort to force a sale. It could have spent that time becoming radically transparent – proving that it had nothing to hide and that its relationship with ByteDance was as distant and distant as it claimed. The company’s leaders could have recognized—and sincerely grappled with—the tension inherent in being a Chinese app that organizes political speeches in the United States and other democratic countries, even though some of that speeches inevitably go in the direction of the Chinese government. not fun.
Instead, TikTok paid lip service to transparency by embarking on Project Texas unconvincing project intended to allay fears of Chinese espionage by moving TikTok’s American user data to data servers of the American company Oracle. Last year it invited reporters to tour a new complex it called the Transparency and Accountability Center in Los Angeles described by some of those present like a neon-lit theme park full of defensive corporate messages.
Mr. Haurek, the TikTok spokesman, said the company’s transparency efforts, including allowing third-party audits of the app’s source code, were “unprecedented” and “far ahead of those of peer companies.”
Mostly, TikTok tried to keep its head down, while privately suggesting that anyone who dared to question the company’s ties to the Chinese government was engaging in paranoid and perhaps racist fear-mongering.
There have even been times when TikTok’s critics have overstepped their bounds, such as the aggressive interrogation which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was confronted last month during a congressional hearing over whether he had ties to the Chinese Communist Party. (Mr Chew is Singaporean.)
But the company also leveled accusations of xenophobia against good-faith skeptics who simply wanted to know how an app from a Chinese tech conglomerate could be free of Chinese influence, given Beijing’s track record of interfering with its tech companies. (I’ll never forget the time a few years ago when a TikTok executive suggested I was a fanatic for asking questions about whether Mr. Chew — who, importantly, was also ByteDance’s chief financial officer at the time — was taking the pressure felt to adhere to Chinese censorship laws.)
The company also expanded its lobbying efforts in Washington and resisted transparency when it came to its own activities.
For example, in 2022, ByteDance employees were caught surveilling US journalists reporting on TikTok, collecting data from the reporters’ TikTok apps in an attempt to identify who was leaking internal conversations and documents to them. Several ByteDance employees were fired after the incident came to light, and the company claimed it was a “misguided” attempt, but for me the idea that this was an unauthorized operation carried out by a few rogue employees never passed the smell test to endure.
My colleagues Sapna Maheshwari and Ryan Mac reported last year that TikTok employees shared U.S. user data on a messaging system known as Lark, which was also used by Chinese ByteDance employees, despite claims from executives that TikTok did not share that data.
And this year, after researchers used a TikTok data tool to collect information on popular videos about topics that are repressed in China — and concluded that videos about several such topics, such as China’s Uyghur population and the Hong Kong protests, are unusually underrepresented were on TikTok compared to other social networks: TikTok quietly limited the tool instead of addressing the criticism.
None of these things on their own would warrant a ban on TikTok. And it’s true that American tech companies engage in similar practices from time to time.
But fair or not, we have always held foreign-owned companies to higher standards. This is especially true for media companies, whose political and cultural influence make them attractive targets for potential meddlers. (Rupert Murdoch was, for example required to become a US citizen before purchasing Fox News, due to laws at the time that prohibited foreigners from purchasing American TV stations.)
TikTok is more powerful than any broadcast network, thanks to its enormous size – 170 million Americans use it – and the tenacity of its algorithms. And it has proven, with its response to Congress’ actions this week, that it is willing to do whatever it takes to get what it wants.
Will TikTok actually be banned? Hard to say. The Senate must still pass the foreclosure bill, and President Biden must sign it. Then it will have to survive the court challenges. ByteDance, which views the sale of TikTok as an absolute last resort, has already indicated that it will launch a campaign full legal battle in order to prevent it. And of course, a ban could be reversed if Mr. Trump — who has turned around TikTok and now says he doesn’t support forcing sales of the app — is elected in November.
It has been deeply depressing to watch TikTok fight for its life in recent weeks, using the same techniques of obfuscation and distraction that critics have been concerned about for years. Like many Americans, I use TikTok every day, and I wanted to protect my favorite time-wasting app from a threat to its existence.
But a company under suspicion must hold itself to a higher standard, and so far TikTok has failed to convince critics that it has sufficiently separated itself from its Chinese owner.
If the company can escape a forced sale, or if the account is blocked by the court, the company should consider itself lucky and get to work creating more real, verifiable distance between itself and ByteDance, to further its claims of independence to strengthen. credible.
And if TikTok is forced to sell, it will have only its own mistakes to blame.