Almost four years after then U.S. President Donald Trump proposed banning social media juggernaut TikTok from operations in America, current President Joe Biden stands poised to do just that under his watch.
Immediately following Biden’s signature of the omnibus bill containing the divestiture requirements for TikTok, CEO Shou Chew appeared on his own platform: “Hi, everyone, it’s Shou here! Rest Assured, we aren’t going anywhere. We will keep fighting for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail.”
Highly unusual, but not unexpected of course. TikTok is an incredibly popular, some might even say powerful, social media platform with a somewhat sketchy governance structure.
Here in Canada TikTok is already banned from federal government-controlled and issued devices (mobile phones, computers, tablets), and has been for a year or so.
What exactly is the concern regarding TikTok? Primarily it centres around the platform’s ownership, through the Chinese company ByteDance. Of course here in North America we have all sorts of other products and services with Chinese ownership, but we’ve never seen anything with quite the reach of TikTok.
TikTok has an estimated pool of 170 million users in the United States alone, a huge fraction of the country’s population. And the typical TikTok user is not a once-a-month visitor. The platform’s highly addictive nature, and ability to serve up short-form videos tailored to the individual, make for extended and repetitive use. Exactly the conditions a product owner needs to make money by dishing out advertising to the captive audience.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington Jan. 31, 2024. He says he will fight any attempts to ban the service. (OSV News photo/Nathan Howard, Reuters)
That TikTok has been so wildly successful at drawing a massive audience is ultimately due to the underlying algorithms that drive its operation. The importance of this set of algorithms is reflected in some estimates of the value of the product. Up to $100 billion for the entire TikTok operation, or $40 billion without the algorithms. Perhaps the greatest value we’ve ever seen attached to an algorithm.
Under terms of the U.S. legislation, TikTok faces a sell-or-ban requirement. Either the platform is sold by ByteDance to a company deemed to not be operating at the whim of the Communist Party of China (CPC), or TikTok is banned from operation in the United States. The legislation spells out a nine-month divestiture time frame, with a further three-month extension if a potential sale is in progress.
Why exactly is the United States moving to ban TikTok, at least under its present governance structure? Can TikTok really be weaponized at the whim of the CPC? Can all those tens of millions of TikTok installations on U.S. mobile devices be turned into mass-surveillance tools?
In all likelihood, no. But there is a flip side to this potential American ban. It is well known that American products are banned in China, among them Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Apple was recently ordered by the CPC to take down WhatsApp and Threads (the Facebook Twitter-like service) from its online stores in China.
Is the U.S. action a tit-for-tat ban? Not really. Some of the American services have been banned in China for almost a decade. At the political level the concern seems to be one of surveillance: what exactly can ByteDance/TikTok get in the way of ancillary data from its users?
A secondary concern is one of propaganda; can TikTok be used to spread misinformation, propaganda if you will, at the behest of the CPC?
Meanwhile, following a meeting with a major ByteDance/TikTok investor, who also happens to be a major investor in Trump Media, Trump himself has had a change of heart and no longer supports a ban. Perhaps money does indeed talk. According to some estimates, Bytedance/TikTok has spent upwards of $7 million lobbying American politicians and running advertisements imploring users to phone their elected representatives to stave off sell-or-ban legislation.
Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied that the legislation was effectively an outright ban on TikTok for American users. She said it was a required sale for “national security concerns.” Exactly what those concerns were was not clarified. Meanwhile, the Biden re-election campaign said it will continue to make use of the TikTok platform “to reach younger voters.”
TikTok’s supporters, particularly those earning substantial monies through the platform, have organized a massive campaign to stave off the American action. However, the part of the campaign that called for American users to phone their elected officials appears to have backfired, in some sense spooking politicians. Ultimately they voted overwhelmingly to force the sale of TikTok.
We asked Andy Baryer, Technology and Digital Lifestyle expert at handyandymedia.com, for his insight on the TikTok developments.
BCC: With the wheels now in motion for either a forced sale or a ban on TikTok in the United States, should Canada follow?
“If TikTok gets banned in the U.S., I think Canada should follow suit. The same national security concerns Canada and the U.S. had with (mobile phone company) Huawei apply to ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Unlike Huawei, I do think there will be a lot of resistance to a national TikTok ban, namely from young people who use TikTok daily. Canada should invest in a public awareness campaign to educate and inform Canadians on the dangers of TikTok.”
BCC: You’ve said you used TikTok briefly and almost immediately deleted it. Why was that?
“I joined TikTok for one week to see what it was all about from a user’s perspective. I provided very little information about myself during the signup. However, it soon figured out what content I liked and I found myself watching a lot of TikTok videos. I realized just how powerful the algorithm was and immediately deleted it off my phone.”
Expect more analysis of just what TikTok does over the next few months. For instance, does clicking on a link within a TikTok session actually launch a keystroke logger, in principle making it possible for ByteDance to log passwords, credit card data and the like?
Stay tuned, particularly as the outcry from content creators and influencers ramps up south of the border.
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