It was lightning politics on 13 March 2024 when the bill to ban TikTok on American soil gained overwhelming bipartisan support in the US House of Representatives, a final count of 352 yays to 65 no votes. It’s a threatening bill directed at ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest from Chinese ownership. This bill still needs to pass the Senate and President Joe Biden has suggested that if the bill passes his desk following an affirmative Senate vote, he will sign it. The fine print on this bill is that ByteDance would have less than 6 months to sell it’s share in the app from foreign ownership before a ban was upheld.
A year ago Faster Networks wrote about the concerns of the American government to reign in data syphoning practices from ByteDance. Practices that they believe could harm US users and national security. ByteDance, at that time, had set up a transparency and accountability centre, called exactly that, and followed that trajectory further with Project Texas, a $1.5-billion attempt to gain American confidence in TikTok’s security. Mashable reported in March 2023 that TikTok CEO was hellbent on placating the fears of US Congress and that this project would keep American data on American soil regulated by an American company. This recent vote proves that Project Texas was a failed attempt at appeasing law makers in the US that American data would not be used against national security or political interference.
Wall Street Journal investigated TikTok to see if Project Texas was a valuable investment and question whether it met the goals of ByteDance to adhere to the rules of engagement by the American government to protect American citizens. They published the results in January 2024. They used bot accounts and traced the algorithm for a user from inception to rabbit hole. As a new user, you are fed the most popular videos on the app. TikTok learns about the user quickly via likes, shares and comments. Ultimately, TikTok works fast and the most telling data it collects is how long is the pause before the user scrolls to the next video. TikTok will have learned enough about you within 2 hours, sometimes 40 mins, before the recommendation engine takes over and you are on a one way trajectory based on a few hashtags, for example, #depression #sadness #cutefrenchbulldog. TikTok will endeavour to show you new content or ideas to maintain focus on the app but it is in the ballpark of 5% of total content watched. In addition, like YouTube, the purpose of the app is user engagement and hijacking attention. Unlike Meta, YouTube and Google, which are all guilty of mismanagement of user data and overt influence, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. If there is a ban on TikTok in the USA, there will be a likely uptick in user hours and loss of life attributed to YouTube which, is already the most used app in the US.
With no hint of irony, TikTok used it’s influence to lobby users to call their member of Congress before the bill reached the House of Representatives and campaign to vote no for a TikTok ban. Their users responded in droves, clogging phone lines and leaving messages such as “if you ban TikTok I will kill myself”. That might be an empty threat but it wasn’t the only call that made an intimidating remark and it was a red flag of how the electorate is being influenced by social media to act politically.
Ted Goia wrote about TikTok’s history on his Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker. The article is a real undertaking and biography of TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, who came from Microsoft some years before and had also been through it with the Chinese Government following the launch of Fanfou, a Chinese like Twitter. The Chinese government shut that down and he vowed to keep the government on side for any future endeavours. Goia calls it boot licking but maybe to have success in China you need to work within the framework of a didactic government. By the way, there is no TikTok in mainland China and no Facebook or YouTube, Bing, X, Instagram, Wikipedia, Netflix, Google, etc…
According to Casey Newton and Kevin Roose on Hard Fork podcast, they laid out an argument to discuss the legitimate reasons for banning TikTok. First being, US social media is not allowed to operate in China, this is a fair play argument. One other clear argument against TikTok is that ByteDance already have proven surveillance on journalists using TikTok to monitor their message and curtail algorithms away from what they see as problematic content against China. When each presenter asked the other for their opinion on the ban, as tech journalists privy to a broader picture beyond the politics, Newton and Roose both agreed, a ban is probably a good thing for national security in the USA.
Trump has flip flopped on his antagonism towards TikTok as he was recently visited by a billionaire donor that helped him change his previously held beliefs that TikTok is a danger to national security because of Chinese ownership. This is an election year and Trump needs all the financial support, wherever it comes from, that he can muster. Follow the money.
And Australia? Well, according to The Guardian, Albanese has no immediate plans to ban TikTok on the back of US threats to do the same. However, Australia has taken some steps to regulate social media over the last 5 years, namely, the News Media Bargaining Code implemented in 2021. We can go our own way with TikTok and we don’t have Silicon Valley breathing down our necks to keep social media America friendly, even if that’s not necessarily true.
