In a rare display of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force ByteDance, the owner of the social media app TikTok, to either sell it to a US buyer or face tough restrictions on its ability to operate in the US.
The vote was a landslide, with 352 Congress members voting in favor and only 65 against. The bill, which was fast-tracked to a vote after being unanimously approved by a committee last week, gives China-based ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.
…The vote in the House represents the most concrete threat to TikTok in an ongoing political battle over allegations the China-based company could collect sensitive user data and politically censor content. TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government.
Although the White House supports this move by the House, it is not clear if the Senate will go along with it.
The people supporting this move cite national security concerns but I do not see it. ByteDance is a Chinese-owned company and the fear seems to be that they will provide a backdoor to the Chinese government to access all the data on users. The company denies any such intention or connection with the Chinese government.
But suppose that it did go ahead and allow the Chinese government full access to all its data, what exactly would be the threat? That the Chinese government would be able to get a good idea of what is driving popular culture in the US? That hardly seems like a major threat. Are they worried that the Chinese government would use TikTok as a propaganda weapon to influence – who exactly? And to what end? Surveys indicate that TikTok users consume mostly entertainment ‘news’ about celebrities or sports and the like, and not what we would consider traditional political news. So is this legislation partly driven by pique that a non-US company has out-innovated the US and created something that is more popular with young people than what US companies like Facebook have been able to do?
The sense of urgency and level of unanimity that is being displayed on this one issue by Congress may be just an election year gimmick, for politicians to show voters that they are tough on China, always a crowd pleaser. On the other hand, TikTok is very popular, especially with young people, and if it were to shut down, even for a short while, that might create some very angry voters.
Here is more information about TikTok and its users.
What has always set TikTok apart from other social media platforms is how quickly it grew. The pandemic is largely behind this boom: It took TikTok two years to get to the 40 million monthly American users it had entering 2020, according to figures released that year by the company. In the following eight months, it more than doubled that number, and it reported more than 100 million monthly users by August 2020.
Most of those users skewed young — and the user base continues to be younger than the rest of the country. The youngest American adults are much more likely to use TikTok than their older cohorts: 62 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds report using TikTok, compared to 39 percent of 30-49 year olds, 24 percent of 50-64 year olds, and 10 percent of those older than 65, according to a comprehensive Pew Research Center study in 2023. And of all social media apps, TikTok is the platform that young users report using the most, only behind the mainstays of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
That survey also documented an important change happening within the app’s user base: it’s getting older. TikTok users aged 18-29 increased by 14 percent from 2021 to 2023. But among millennials (those aged 30-49), TikTok usage rose by 17 percent — outpacing growth among younger users.
“So while TikTok use is still most prevalent among that youngest cohort … it’s seen the most growth among those aged 30-49,” Pew computation social scientist Samuel Bestvater told me.
So where does serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) stand on this issue? All over the place. While president, he called for its banning but now has has suddenly switched. In an interview with CNBC, he gave a meandering and confusing word salad response.
Alex Shepherd gives a possible reason for the switch.
The push to ban TikTok began in 2020, when Trump signed an executive order that sought to remove it from app stores. After booting Trump from office, President Biden said he would sign a law doing exactly that, should it pass Congress.
…And then Trump threw a wrench in those plans. It’s possible he’s thinking about the general election, as his standing has improved dramatically with young voters. He has also softened his stance on China, affirming its “One China” policy on Taiwan and insisting the country is only an “economic” rival of the U.S., not a military one. (He has said he would impose 60 percent tariffs on Chinese goods if reelected. And yet, Beijing seems to be rooting for him to return to the White House, if only because it believes, with good reason, a second Trump term would damage America’s global standing.)
…Still, there’s little reason to believe that either politics or policy are behind Trump’s shift on TikTok. Instead, Trump was doing what he did again and again throughout his presidency: listening to a rich friend and then changing his policy advice based on their advice. In this case, the friend was Jeff Yass, a billionaire who has emerged as a powerful backer of Trump’s reelection effort. Yass, notably, also has a huge stake in TikTok—owning a reported 15 percent stake in the company, worth billions.
On March 1, Yass visited Mar-a-Lago, where Trump praised him as “brilliant” and credited him with saving the previously ruptured relationship with the Club for Growth, the powerful conservative advocacy group that had opposed many of the former president’s protectionist economic policies. Many—including former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon—see Yass’s influence in Trump’s decision to oppose an outright ban on TikTok.
What lawmakers must be hoping for is that ByteDance will quickly come to an agreement to sell TikTok to some US buyer, like the group being created by former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.
So, the deal as described hands control of TikTok in the United States, and access to its 152? million users in the U.S,. to the former president via his former Treasury Secretary in an election year? And how many Democrats voted for this? What am I missing here?
In a recent e-mail message, Robert Reich asks whether we should trust U.S. billionaires with TikTok more that we trust China. He doesn’t trust either one and neither do I.
Both the Democratic and Republican wings of the oligarch party are all in favor of their masters getting even more power. Film at eleven.
I started writing a long answer, but after the third paragraph I decided to try to be short and since you are all smart people here, you can fill in the blanks.
TikTok, as I understand it, includes location data in it’s messages. No one cares about the location data for the vast majority of people, but for a small number of people it can be a matter of national security. If the Chinese government is looking to compromise a person of interest, say someone who works at the Pentagon or a Congresscritter, a good way of doing do is to track location data on a large number of them. Then plot that data out to find out which ones have been frequenting dens-of-ill-repute or any place where that person would be embarrassed if it was made public, like a party with Jeffery Epstein (very embarrassing now that he’s dead.). Then a little blackmail could very easily get that person doing favors for the Chinese. This works also for people close to a person of interest, the daughter of a White House aid for example.
Sure, there are lots of ways to collect this information, but gathering it from an app on a phone is pretty easy. If you think the Chinese government would have a hard time getting the data from TikTok, think again. It would be handed to them just like the US tech companies hand similar information to the US government. Yes, I’m certain the US government already does the same thing, this isn’t a moral issue it really is about national security.
Finally, because of the focus on TikTok, this leads me to believe that at least one US government official has already been found compromised using this method. To my knowledge nothing has been made public. It probably will become public knowledge at some point, when it won’t create an uproar. Based on the number of congresscritters who have supported the bill, on both sides of the aisle, I suspect they have had a briefing naming both the people and the information compromised.
I agree with hyphenman. If Steven Mnuchin et.al. get their mitts on it, I would be WAY more worried with how they would use it to influence such a large audience.
Good, people in government are finally concerned about data privacy and the mental health of young people. I’m thrilled that they will soon be
-- mounting similar investigations into Meta, Google, and Apple
-- passing strong, meaningful, data privacy laws
-- moving to shut down data brokers so the selling of data is reduced
-- setting aside money for increased aid to mental health professionals and organizations to give direct help to people who need it
Oh, wait: the aren’t going to do any of those because this whole tik-tok thing is simply an outgrowth of racism on the right and posing on the left, even though they realize this bill wouldn’t accomplish anything? Who could ahve guessed
flex @#3,
Thanks for that informative response.
My first reaction too was that it might be a tool to enable blackmail because that is the main national security threat that immediately comes to mind. But it still seems a little complicated. In this day and age, almost all of us are leaving a detailed digital trail and TikTok is just one source of it. But then again, I am not too knowledgeable about this area and there may be all manner of things that could be gleaned from trawling through vast amounts of TikTok user data that could compromise someone that could not be obtained from other sources.
“TikTok is just one source of it”
Its ubiquity is its strength
No argument about TikTok does not apply to Xwitter and Farcebooj and all social media as well. Congress is just protecting US worthless social media, I.e: blatant market manipulation. Facebook is losjng out and we can’t have that.
Congress is stupid (of course). They ought to treat email/social media as a public service. I never understood why governments aren’t smart enough to see that. Federated ID, email, limited cloud storage, calendaring -- basic stuff. Leaving that to the free market is irresponsible because the free market sux.
There are two big obvious things going on. The first is a simple eye for an eye retaliation. China doesn’t let any outside company own social media in China so why should the US let a Chinese company own social media here?
The second is concern for China using TikTok for propaganda. Obviously a concern because they do already through biasing searching and the basic feed. All of the social media companies do this to some degree. It isn’t in the US’s interest to let China manipulate the feed in the US.
There are also concerns for security and worries about what happens when a China/Taiwan war starts. Neither of those are huge. Security for cell phones has too many holes to worry about it to much. If a war breaks down TikTok just gets universal block in Taiwan, US, Korea, Japan and other countries on Taiwan’s side.
I think the following article in The Conversation spells it out fairly well. Chinese owned companies are not independent from the Chinese government, they are more like private-public partnerships, and if the government wants information (or anything else) from a business, it gets it, end of story. Under democratic capitalism, companies can contest government overreach in the courts. There is also a level of public scrutiny; businesses fight tooth and nail to avoid it, but it’s better than in China, where the government wields unchecked power and whistleblowers are jailed.
https://theconversation.com/is-tiktoks-parent-company-an-agent-of-the-chinese-state-in-china-inc-its-a-little-more-complicated-225749
Heh. The slant is crude.
I’m surprised that you haven’t the claims that the present backlash against Tik Tok is due to the fact content creators on Tik Tok supporting Palestine outnumber those supporting Israel by 10 to 1.
If you think google, apple, and other companies here don’t simply roll over and give data to govt agencies and law enforcement when asked you haven’t been paying attention.
The mistake of the bill is to think Tiktok is unique in terms of information collection, but it is no worse than any other massive social media platform. This bill doesn’t stop information collection of its American users, it merely places the information collection back in American hands -- just like its peers have been doing all along.
If corporations are people, wouldn’t a ban that named TikTok constitute a Bill of Attainder, and therefore be unconstitutional?
The US intelligence community has massively and uselessly backdoored twitter, facebook, Apple, google, etc. There is behind the scenes posturing that a Chinese company won’t share their backdoors. So, threats. There was similar posturing when Blackerry tried to keep India’s government out of their crypto, until they gave up the keys. Congress cannot say that this is why it’s happening, so there’s a lot of false pretenses.