A U.S. ban on TikTok could now come “within weeks,” the Daily Telegraph reported on July 17, citing White House officials. It is also now much clearer how such a ban would work. There will not be some form of website block or internet censorship, instead TikTok will likely be added to the same entity list that Washington has used against Huawei. This threatened TikTok ban, which started as an opportunistic political point, has now gathered serious momentum. Tens of millions of American users might be about to lose their daily TikTok fix.
The unsolvable problem for TikTok is that allegations of cyber risk and data privacy—which can be defended—have given way to the intangible accusation of Chinese influence and control. If you want to know how easy it is to defend against that kind of charge, just ask Huawei. And so the nightmare for TikTok is that just as a ban has become more serious and more practical (through the entity list), it has also become impossible for the company to do much about.
The U.S. is now bracketing TikTok with Huawei, implying the same kind of risks. In reality, though, the two are very different. While Huawei networks carry data that, the U.S. argues, might be sensitive and might be shared with China, TikTok is an open-access social media platform, it is not really a risk to national security at this moment in time. Yes, it has had its issues with data privacy and cyber security, and, yes, it’s a Chinese app collecting a lot of data on U.S. and European citizens. But all social media does the same, and foreign powers have shown they don’t need to look further than Facebook or Twitter to seek to misinform and influence.
The most cogent national security argument against TikTok is that user feeds and actions might be analysed and manipulated to influence their behavior. This might relate to voting intentions and could be used to sway public opinion. In addition, the superset of TikTok data might be shared with Beijing, offering an insight into political views by location, which might also help shape disinformation campaigns. The sharing of information relating to COVID-19 is a good example of where TikTok could potentially push a message that’s friendly to China.
There is also the Facebook argument. When the U.S. platform first scaled, no-one expected it to achieve the influence and reach it now enjoys. Facebook has steadily increased its scope of services to influence ever more parts of users’ lives. If TikTok is allowed to grow unimpeded, what would stop it expanding beyond video sharing.
Clearly, the real driver behind a potential TikTok ban is political, pressuring China over the current technology standoff and its actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. The U.S. and allies have proven with Huawei that a smoking gun is not required to act.
Adding TikTok to a Commerce Department entity list would choke off its access to U.S. tech. If TikTok is not available on app stores, if it cannot be updated, then how does it reach its users? What about any U.S. hardware used in the background and U.S. cloud service providers used for storage and processing? According to the FT, any such entity list decision might come within the next month, and would “send a very strong message to China.”
It is this kind of restriction that has devastated Huawei’s sales of new smartphones outside China. The U.S. entity list denied those phones access to Google software and services, and so consumers stayed away. The phones sold well in China, where Google is banned, but not elsewhere. The latest U.S. sanctions against Huawei have also denied the company access to key chips, and it was the impact this had on security, that prompted the U.K. to ban Huawei from its 5G network.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s warning to Americans earlier this month, that you should only use TikTok “if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” is similar in tone to the campaign against Huawei and has since been echoed by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, adviser Peter Navarro and the president himself. Trump’s presidential campaign is even running Facebook ads promoting a ban: “TikTok has been caught red handed by monitoring what is on your phone’s clipboard—Sign the petition now to ban TikTok.”
When I reported the Apple iOS 14 clipboard issue, TikTok was quick to offer a defense: This was an anti-spam filter and would be shut down. Similarly, when I asked about the allegations it was sending U.S. citizens’ data to China, I was told that the company has a U.S. CEO and CISO, a heavyweight board, it stores its data outside China and would not provide personal data to China, even if asked.
But TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and ByteDance is a Chinese entity with a Chinese CEO and a Chinese sister-app to TikTok that is a state-compliant surveillance tool. And so I asked TikTok, given that China has banned U.S. social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, denying its citizens access, why should the U.S. not do the same to a Chinese owned platform?”
I have yet to receive a reply.
And this is TikTok’s problem. It can implement every western security and data protection protocol it can find, but it cannot mask its provenance. And while it might be true that Beijing has never perused the data collected by TikTok for individuals or studied demographic trends, that isn’t to say it won’t. And if the Ministry of State Security comes calling, many assume ByteDance will have no choice but to comply.
All of this came to the fore when TikTok pulled out of Hong Kong after the territory’s new national security law came into force. TikTok’s decision was mixed in with other social media giants—Facebook, Twitter, Google—changing their local operations in protest. But TikTok’s reasons were very different—it could not refuse to comply with the new law as might the others, it would have no choice but to provide data and detail. Better to shut down locally than suffer the reputational hit.
There are strong parallels in the U.S. allegations against Huawei and TikTok, albeit the two companies operate in completely different spheres. In both cases, the core security allegations are unproven, relying instead on an interpretation of Beijing’s influence and control over its domestic technology sector. It’s less a case of finding a smoking gun, and more a case of “we allege that they can if they want.”
In response to such claims, TikTok says “we have no higher priority than promoting a safe and secure app experience for our users. We have never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked." Huawei has said almost exactly the same when asked, although, just like TikTok, allegations have been made that the tech giant has done exactly that.
TikTok has done all it can to protect against the allegations now being thrown out by the U.S. administration. In reality, there is little more it can do while Chinese-owned. And so there is talk of ByteDance moving TikTok to some form of arms-length U.S. corporate structure, and potentially shifting to a European HQ, although there are serious technical considerations that would come into play given where the company’s code and engineering sits.
It will be difficult for the Trump administration to simply back down now, without taking some action or introducing some sanctions against TikTok. And, unlike Huawei which operates a very limited consumer business in the U.S., this could prove an extremely unpopular move. Fortunately for Trump and his administration, Facebook is on hand with an accelerated U.S. Reels rollout, to soften the user blow and ease the politics.
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