President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid bill on April 24, 2024, beginning a nine-month grace period for TikTok's China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. The president can extend the deadline by three months, and TikTok has signaled it plans to challenge the bill in court.
If the law passes and the company fails to sell its app, TikTok will be blocked from all app stores and web hosting services in the U.S. This will affect TikTok's more than 170 million U.S. users, including 62% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.
It will also change the way we consume news and information. Unlike its competitors, TikTok has seen a year-over-year increase in the percentage of users who regularly seek out news on the platform, with roughly one-third of Americans under the age of 30 using TikTok as a news source.
The main objections to ByteDance-owned TikTok include that it enables foreign influence on U.S. public opinion, encourages harmful behavior among minors and undermines the data privacy of Americans, but none of these concerns are unique to TikTok or new among social media platforms.
Foreign Influence and Propaganda
Lawmakers have expressed concern that the Chinese government could control the content TikTok users see and thus influence public opinion and ultimately politics in the U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, warned that allowing TikTok to establish itself as a major U.S. news platform would put control of information in the hands of ByteDance and, ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said TikTok's role in challenging ConocoPhillips' Willow oil drilling project in Alaska could be a Chinese influence operation aimed at undermining U.S. energy dominance.
However, U.S.-based social media platforms have been and continue to be exploited by various foreign governments and their proxies, including China, to try to influence public opinion in the U.S. Russian intelligence has used platforms such as Facebook and X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) for this purpose for nearly a decade, ever since it attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
These influence campaigns create and maintain coordinated cross-platform networks, and researchers argue that Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube deny them access to the data needed to track or prevent such activity.
Dangerous for minors
Some lawmakers have warned that TikTok exposes kids to content that leads to risky behaviors like eating disorders and self-harm, but all social media can pose such threats.
For example, internal documents leaked by a whistleblower revealed that Meta knew as early as 2019 that its platform could be harming the mental health and well-being of minors in the United States. The company's internal investigation found that the platform contributed to body image issues and eating disorders among teenage girls, and exposed teens to other harmful behaviors, including bullying, substance abuse, and self-harm.
Currently, 41 states and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits against Meta for alleged harm caused to minors.
At the same time, there has been little outcry about how time spent on social media increases young people's exposure to hateful content, and how platforms such as YouTube are funneling users down the radicalization pipeline.
Data Security and Privacy
Supporters of the TikTok No Sale Act argue that the app poses an unacceptable threat to data privacy, with Rep. Gallagher arguing that the Chinese government could use it for espionage, “to find Americans, steal their data, and track the locations of journalists.”
But there's little reason to think that Americans' data is safer with a U.S.-based company. Meta has been hit by a variety of data privacy scandals, and leaked documents last year revealed that even Meta's engineers themselves had little understanding or control over how people's data was used.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), a co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, cited the case of dating app Grindr as a successful precedent for forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok. In 2020, the Chinese company that owned Grindr sold it to a U.S. company following security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok. But last year, a Catholic extremist group in Denver bought location and usage data from Grindr and other dating apps to track LGBTQ+ priests.
Moreover, the Chinese government hardly needs to control TikTok to access the reams of data its apps, devices, and smart appliances collect on Americans, much of which can be purchased entirely legally from commercial data brokers, regardless of who owns it.
Data freely available for purchase on the open market has been found to include location data of people visiting Planned Parenthood stores and mobile device location data that, if de-anonymized, could reveal the location of the President of the United States.
The need for regulation
Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are not unique. The threats posed by TikTok are the same ones that U.S.-based social media has posed for over a decade. I believe lawmakers should act to address the harm caused by profit-driven U.S. companies and foreign companies spying.
Protecting Americans cannot be achieved by simply banning one app: to truly protect their constituents, lawmakers will need to enact far-reaching regulations.