As we exist in an age of surveillance, our online habits are meticulously recorded so that marketers can package and then sell them back to us in the form of targeted advertisements to maximize profit for corporations. Unfortunately, in America, this is standard practice for social media and tech companies. If that surprises you, then you — like the overwhelming majority of people — have never read a social media app’s “Terms of Service” when signing up, as almost all include the caveat that they’re allowed to collect and distribute your data however they see fit. One such app with this permission is TikTok. TikTok is owned by the Chinese parent company ByteDance and the app itself boasts over 1 billion monthly users worldwide. It’s become a significant pillar of modern culture both on and offline.
In March of this year, a bill was proposed in Congress that could potentially shut down TikTok’s operations in America. Lawmakers are insisting that ByteDance hand ownership of TikTok over to an American corporation, lest it be banned from the country altogether. This crackdown seems to have come out of nowhere, so what are the proposed reasons for banning this social media monolith?
The bill itself suggests that TikTok is selling users’ data not only to advertisers, but to the Chinese government. In addition, purposely vague claims of “Chinese propaganda” are a driving factor. ByteDance representatives deny this claim, and have a long history of speaking out against collaborating with the Chinese government on the ownership of American data. They even take precautions to not store the data of casual users in China, with the exception being the data of TikTok influencers who get paid through the Creator Fund.
Other than the location of the creator fund servers, nothing has been found or suggested that should lead investigators to believe that Americans’ search histories are falling into the wrong hands. So what’s the big deal? In 2022, Facebook — an American-owned company — fell into hot water when they were found to have illegally allowed a company tied to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign access to user data. A class action lawsuit against Facebook ended with the company paying out almost $1 billion to users whose data had been breached. Why was Facebook allowed to settle in court over a case that was confirmed to have a political agenda when TikTok is nearing an outright ban for unsubstantiated speculation? From my vantage point, there are two probable reasons that go hand-in-hand.
First, TikTok is a relatively new app populated mostly by youth. This includes young adults all the way down to the app’s minimum user age of 13, although it is infamously easy for children under that age to make an account despite it being an alleged requirement.
It’s also no secret that younger people tend to lean towards the left politically. Due to this, the app has garnered a reputation of being host to many pro-queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist etc. communities that conservative lawmakers have spoken out as not being fans of. Aside from just lawmakers, many older — and often conservative — Americans know of TikTok second-hand from sensationalized news stories of dangerous challenges. This demographic may already distrust it because of political leanings and the trend of older people disliking new technology. This distrust makes them susceptible to misinformation, including exaggerated claims about the app’s impact.
Secondly, and even deeper, is the psychology of the Red Scare. America is petrified of communism. We have fought wars, trained spies and sent men to the moon in the name of our golden boy: capitalism. So much of our culture is founded on this blind, panicking fear that still exists today, mostly in the older, more conservative demographic. China is a communist country. Nothing will usurp that in the eyes of the public, not even the fact that China is our third-biggest trading partner and has been for decades. They are painted as deplorable despite our constant association and outsourcing of labor to their citizens.
Even though TikTok is a privately-owned billion dollar company — the concept of which already isn’t very communist if you ask me — the fact that it is Chinese makes many in the generations brought up before the 90s struggle to come to terms with its prevalence. When Americans are raised to believe that nothing short of absolute capitalistic profitism is the only way to freedom, seeing their kids on a Chinese app gives politicians something to latch onto. The presidential election was only eight months away when this bill was introduced. If the Biden administration can get baby boomers’ grandkids off of the “communist app,” then the concerned but confused centrists may just give him a shot at another four years. Now congressmen can fearmonger and point the finger at a corporation in hopes of retaining their cushy seats though the next election cycle.
Banning TikTok is meaningless “security theater,” in the words of Calli Schroeder, Senior Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, that allows for the illusion of lawmakers protecting the public. We allow American megacorporations to steal and illegally sell the information of citizens for political gain with mere slaps on the wrist, but a Chinese company is banned for mere speculation. America operates in a free market until they catch a glimpse of Red.