The US Senate has approved a bill intended to force Chinese business ByteDance to sell TikTok, the popular social media platform. The bill will now need to be enacted by President Joe Biden, who has already said he supports it. When that happens, ByteDance will have just 270 days to find a buyer for TikTok, unless Biden grants a further 90-day reprieve with the justification that substantial progress towards a sale was underway. If the deadline passes without a sale then US app stores will be prohibited from supplying TikTok further, effectively rendering the app obsolete over time because users will no longer be able to obtain updates to the software.
There is a genuine concern that TikTok gathers tremendous amounts of data about its users, and that the Chinese Communist Party can legally demand access to all of it. Tracking the movements of a huge slice of the population and being able to exert influence through highly-tailored propaganda would be huge advantages to a hostile power. There was already broad bipartisan support for forcing the sale of TikTok, but this was cemented when Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson chose to bundle it with funding for Ukraine, creating a package that few senators were willing to oppose.
Democrat Senator Maria Cantwell, Head of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, had previously voiced reservations about the bill. However, she urged colleagues to vote in favor, saying:
Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance blind operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our US government personnel.
TikTok has 170 million users in the USA. ByteDance hoped to energize its user base to lobby against the forced sale but their methods appear to have backfired. The angry and confused lobbying methods employed by some TikTok creators strengthened the resolve of politicians already worried about the extent of Chinese influence.
ByteDance is likely to fight the new law, with the result that its effects may be delayed for years. They will argue that the sale of TikTok impinges on the free speech rights of Americans. There is some irony in the insistence that free speech must be delivered by a vehicle headquartered in China given that the Chinese government has been so shameless in oppressing the speech of so many of its own citizens, never mind crushing freedom movements in Tibet and Hong Kong, repeatedly threatening democrats in Taiwan, and using brutal methods to shut down any criticism of their rule, no matter where it comes from. It is a further irony that ByteDance insist they are not controlled by the Chinese government when that government has already promised to block the sale of TikTok to a non-Chinese owner.
American investors in ByteDance have spent heavily on lobbying politicians, but seemingly to little effect. The USD30bn fortune of prominent Republican donor Jeff Yass is threatened by the new bill, as his investment fund was one of the earliest backers of ByteDance outside of China. Yass has spent more than USD46mn on Republican candidates this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a non-profit entity that monitors campaign finance and lobbying. Some speculate that the influence of a small group of hard-right Republicans has encouraged former President Donald Trump to flip-flop on how to handle TikTok; Trump voiced opposition to the new bill although he unsuccessfully attempted to force the sale of TikTok when he was in command. However, this appears to be one issue where the majority of elected Republicans are unwilling to follow the lead of the former President.
Forcing the sale of TikTok is the right thing to do. It sends a signal to the Chinese Communist Party that they cannot use a combination of technology, money and the size of the Chinese market to gain an information advantage without facing any opposition from the US government. Many of the American users of TikTok who opposed this bill cited a whole lot of objections that had no relevance to the core issue: whether their data may be misused. Perhaps they have grown understandably cynical about the extent to which American companies also abuse personal data. But there remains a threat of the Orwellian misuse of automatically gathered data. Choosing not to acknowledge this threat is not the same as mitigating the threat. For once, the broad swathe of American politicians have reacted appropriately to a genuine technology-driven risk to privacy and security.
