Tech, Talk, and TikTok

In August 2020, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency with an unlikely cause: the video-sharing app TikTok. At issue was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and its close connections with the Chinese Communist Party. Trump argued that TikTok gave the CCP “access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” and, using emergency powers, he forbade financial interaction with the company. A second executive order required ByteDance to sell TikTok to an outside corporation. Understandably, ByteDance fought the orders in the courts; six months later, President Joe Biden rescinded them, and the case was dropped.

Three years later, only the teams have changed. A bipartisan “TikTok ban” bill passed Congress in April 2024 and was signed by President Biden on April 24^th. Properly speaking, the new law is not a ban; as before, it gives ByteDance time to sell TikTok, before the app is blocked from all U.S. storefronts. A coalition opposing the bill included the ACLU and the Electronic Freedom Foundation — and, oddly, Donald Trump, who claimed that “Crooked Joe Biden” wanted only “to help his friends at Facebook become richer and more dominant.” For their part, Biden allies suggested that Trump’s opposition was on behalf of billionaire Jeff Yass, a Republican donor and major TikTok shareholder.

The act’s merits are complex even before resolving who-is-on-which-side-now. Political motivations aside, the new law offers a reasonable — if partial — step towards American information security.

One possible motive for legislation is obvious: the evidence strongly suggests that TikTok acts as a propaganda wing of the CCP — and an influential one, used by more than one in three Americans. Most social media sites rely on opaque and proprietary algorithms to filter content to users, and sites like Facebook have long been accused of political bias in which posts they favor or restrict. TikTok, however, has been more blatant in its filtering. Videos with hashtags referencing China’s moral horrors — such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the ongoing Uyghur genocide — appear far less often, sometimes at one-twentieth the rate of similar sites. When accused of deliberately suppressing such content, TikTok simply removed the ability to track hashtags at all.

And yet bias is, in itself, a poor reason to restrict the app. Critics of the new legislation raise concerns of government overreach, and with good reason; in recent years, both parties have repeatedly moved to constrain free speech on claims of bias. Indeed, a speech-based TikTok ban might be an unconstitutional breach of the First Amendment, as a federal judge ruled last year. Even if not, such a ruling would run counter to the principles behind the Amendment: the commitment that, in the contest of ideas, truth does not fear competition. Restricting TikTok on speech grounds alone — however loathsome the politics behind that speech — both betrays a fundamental American ideal and smooths the way for future governments to likewise ban whatever speech they find distasteful. (READ MORE: The First Amendment: An Inconvenience to the Government)

But the primary concern in this case is not the data TikTok delivers to Americans; rather, it is the data it extracts from them. Cyberanalyst company Internet 2.0 recently posted “privacy risk” ratings for nearly two dozen common apps, with higher scores indicating greater risk to user privacy. TikTok scored more than twice the group average; only a single Russian media app was even close. The analysts claim that TikTok monitors information ranging from the user’s Wi-Fi data, to phone numbers, to personal calendars, to physical location. For its part, TikTok asserts that these risks are overblown or inaccurate, or that data collected are only used for better marketing. In a recent statement, CEO Shou Zi Chew insisted that the app has not and will not share any data with the CCP.

Recent history undermines these defenses. In 2022, several TikTok employees were caught using the app to track reporters and identify internal leaks. That such monitoring was even possible demonstrates the app’s invasive nature — and proves false ByteDance’s earlier claims that it “could not monitor U.S. users in [this] way.”

Indeed, while the CCP holds only a 1 percent share in ByteDance, its so-called “golden shares” guarantee a CCP official on the board of directors. (Their current choice once posted, “Let the Chinese traitors preaching so-called ‘human rights and freedom’ go to hell!!”) Further, under China’s National Intelligence Law, ByteDance is legally required to submit any requested information to the Chinese government. How, then, can the Beijing-headquartered company insist it will never honor such demands?

None of this obviates the free speech concerns raised above. At the same time, TikTok cannot avoid privacy charges merely because its speech claims are valid. Imagine a news reporter who moonlighted as a spy; whether his editorials were protected speech should be utterly irrelevant to his arrest. Indeed, the original Trump executive order appeals primarily to intelligence concerns: that the app could help the CCP collect blackmail data, track federal employees, and otherwise compromise U.S. security. Trump’s orders might fairly be rejected as executive overreach — but the recent law, as a work of Congress, avoids this objection as well. (READ MORE: A Step in the Right Direction for Elon Musk’s Free Speech Agenda)

If there remains a critique of the divestment law, it is that its protections are simply insufficient: that the CCP might acquire similar information in other ways. As one expert said, the law “patch[es] one hole in an extremely leaky boat.” Any fix, however, must begin somewhere — and as first steps go, an app explicitly beholden to hostile foreign powers seems a good place to begin.

Brian J. Dellinger is professor of computer science and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Grove City College.

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