When President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid bill into law on April 24, it started the clock on a nine-month window for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. The president can extend the deadline by three months, and TikTok has indicated that it plans to challenge the law in court.
If the law stands and the company fails to sell the app, TikTok will be blocked from any U.S. app store or web-hosting service. This would affect TikTok’s over 170 million U.S. users, including 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29.
It would also alter the news and information landscape. Unlike its competitors, TikTok has been annually increasing its proportion of users who regularly seek news on the platform. Nearly one-third of Americans under 30 use TikTok as a news source.
The main arguments against TikTok under ByteDance’s ownership include that it enables foreign influence on U.S. public opinion, promotes harmful behaviors among minors, and undermines Americans’ data privacy. However, none of these concerns are new or unique to TikTok among social media platforms.
Lawmakers have expressed concern that the Chinese government could influence U.S. public opinion, and thereby politics, by exerting control over what content TikTok users see. Rep. Mike Gallager, R-Wis., co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, warned that allowing TikTok to establish itself as the dominant news platform in America is placing control of information in the hands of ByteDance and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party.
But U.S-based social media platforms have been and continue to be exploited by a range of foreign governments, including China, and their proxies who use them to attempt to influence U.S. public opinion. Beginning with its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, Russian intelligence has long used platforms such as Facebook and X.
Proponents of the TikTok sale-or-ban law also claim that the app constitutes an unacceptable threat to data privacy. Gallagher asserted that the Chinese government could use TikTok for espionage to “find Americans, exfiltrate data and track the location of journalists.”
Yet, there is little reason to believe Americans’ data is safer with U.S.-based companies. Meta has had a wide range of data privacy scandals. Last year, leaked documents showed that even Meta engineers themselves have minimal understanding or control over how people’s data is used.
The Chinese government hardly needs control of TikTok to access the troves of data that apps, devices and smart appliances collect from Americans. Much of this data can be purchased, completely legally, from commercial data brokers, regardless of who owns it.
Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade. I believe that lawmakers should take action to address harms caused by U.S. companies seeking profit, as well as by foreign companies perpetrating espionage.
Sarah Florini is an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
