In recent months, lawmakers in the
United States, Europe and Canada have escalated efforts to restrict access to
TikTok, the massively popular short-form video app that is owned by the Chinese
company ByteDance, citing security threats.
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The White House told federal agencies on
Monday that they had 30 days to delete the app from government devices. Canada
and the executive arm of the European Union also recently banned the app from
official devices.
A US House committee on Wednesday backed an
even more extreme step, voting to advance legislation that would allow
President Joe Biden to ban TikTok from all devices nationwide.
Here is why the pressure has been ratcheted up
on TikTok, which has said that it is used by more than 100 million Americans.
Why are
governments banning TikTok?It all comes down to China.
Lawmakers and regulators in the West have
increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance,
may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the
Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government
to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for
intelligence-gathering operations. They are also worried that China could use
TikTok’s content recommendations for misinformation.
“In democratic governments, the government can’t just ban free speech or expression without very strong and tailored grounds to do so, and it’s just not clear that we have that yet.”
TikTok has long denied such allegations and
has tried to distance itself from ByteDance.
Have
any countries banned TikTok?India banned the platform in mid-2020, costing
ByteDance one of its biggest markets as the government cracked down on 59
Chinese-owned apps, claiming that they were secretly transmitting users’ data
to servers outside India.
In Jordan, the Public Security Directorate’s
Cybercrime Unit announced the temporary suspension of the platform in the
Kingdom on December 16 of last year, stating that it had failed to crack down
on “content inciting violence”, hate speech, and calls for vandalism during a
strike by truck and transportation drivers.
The ban in Jordan is still in effect.
What is
happening with bans in the United States?Since November, more than two dozen states
have banned TikTok on government-issued devices, and many colleges — like the
University of Texas at Austin, Auburn University, and Boise State University —
have blocked it from campus Wi-Fi networks. The app has already been banned for
three years on US government devices used by the Army, the Marine Corps, the
Air Force, and the Coast Guard. But the bans typically do not extend to
personal devices. And students often just switch to cellular data to use the
app.
Is the
American Congress trying to ban TikTok?Some members would like to. This week, the
House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to approve a bill that could grant a
president the authority to ban the platform entirely. (Courts previously
stopped a Trump administration effort to do this.)
“The general consensus from the privacy community is that TikTok collects a lot of data, but it’s not out of step with the amount of data collected by other apps.”
In January, Senator Josh Hawley introduced a
bill to ban TikTok for all Americans after pushing for a measure, which passed
in December as part of a spending package, that banned TikTok on all devices
issued by the federal government. A separate bipartisan bill, introduced in
December, also sought to ban TikTok and target any similar social media
companies from countries like Russia and Iran.
What is
the Biden administration doing?It has been largely quiet, though the White
House pointed to an ongoing review just this week in response to questions
about TikTok. TikTok has been in yearslong confidential talks with the
administration’s review panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the
United States, to address questions about TikTok and ByteDance’s relationship
with the Chinese government and the handling of user data. TikTok has said that
it has heard close to nothing since its August submission of a 90-page proposal
detailing how it planned to operate in the US while addressing national
security concerns.
Can the
US government ban an app?Most of the existing TikTok bans have been
implemented by governments and universities that have the power to keep an app
off their devices or networks.
Of course, millions of Americans, digital creators and marketers would hate to see the platform go away, and blocking a popular app could create a political backlash among young people.
A broader, government-imposed ban that stops
Americans from using an app that allows them to share their views and art could
face legal challenges on First Amendment grounds, said Caitlin Chin, a fellow
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After all, large numbers
of Americans, including elected officials and major news organizations
including The New York Times and The Washington Post, now produce videos on
TikTok.
“In democratic governments, the government
can’t just ban free speech or expression without very strong and tailored
grounds to do so, and it’s just not clear that we have that yet,” said Chin.
What
has TikTok’s response been?TikTok has referred to the bans as “political
theater” and criticized lawmakers for attempting to censor Americans. “The
swiftest and most thorough way to address any national security concerns about
TikTok is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on
for nearly two years,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a
statement. Separately, TikTok has been trying to win allies, recently making an
uncharacteristic push in Washington to meet with influential think tanks,
public interest groups, and lawmakers to promote the plan it submitted to the
government.
How are
TikTok’s privacy and security issues different from Instagram’s, Facebook’s, or
Twitter’s?
Chinese ownership seems to be the main issue.
Critics of the efforts to ban the platform
have pointed out that all social media networks engage in rampant collection of
their users’ data.
Fight for the Future, a nonprofit digital
rights group, recently waged a #DontBanTikTok campaign with the goal of
redirecting lawmakers’ attention on TikTok to creating data and privacy laws
that would apply to all Big Tech companies.
“The general consensus from the privacy
community is that TikTok collects a lot of data, but it’s not out of step with
the amount of data collected by other apps,” said Robyn Caplan, a senior
researcher at Data & Society Research Institute.
Who
else opposes a ban?The American Civil Liberties Union sent a
letter this week to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to protest its bill,
saying that the legislation would violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Of course, millions of Americans, digital
creators and marketers would hate to see the platform go away, and blocking a
popular app could create a political backlash among young people.
What
can I do right now to protect my data if I use TikTok?To protect your privacy on TikTok, you can
employ the same practices used to protect yourself on other social media
platforms. That includes not giving apps permission to access your location or
contacts. You can also watch TikTok videos without opening an account.
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