This wouldn’t be unprecedented: The gay hookup app Grindr was sold to a Chinese company called Kunlun in 2016, and in March 2019 CFIUS determined that its ownership of the US company caused a national security risk. In the Internet age, where information is abundant but human attention is finite, the ability of a social platform’s recommendation system to retain and sustain users’ interest is directly correlated to its chance of survival in the competitive attention economy. Done for the right reasons, a TikTok ban could actually be good policy in response to limits on foreign companies operating in China. TikTok’s US general manager, Vanessa Pappas, commented that TikTok will remain in the US. We soon learned the truth: the Chinese government had blocked Facebook. The latter is owned by Chinese e-commerce monolith Alibaba. And then you realize: the government banned YouTube. That should be reason enough to act—and it’s looking ever more likely it will be. A Republican senator says it is a “Trojan horse.” It is worth noting that TikTok is a cultural wonder in itself. We just don’t seem to live there. The US government could legally sever TikTok from its parent company Bytedance, as it has done in the past with other Chinese companies. Mediacorp Pte Ltd. All rights reserved. An informed public is critical right now. TikTok’s role as a centralised, assertive information dispenser goes hand-in-hand with platform users’ role as the passive information receivers, most of whom seem perfectly happy to stay this way. Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told The Verge that “The [Communist] Party of China collects bulk data overseas and then uses it to help with things that relate to state security like propaganda and identifying public sentiment to understand how people feel about a particular issue,” she said. When TikTok is asked about claims to the contrary, it stands by the lack of proof, the missing smoking gun. The app TikTok has been repeatedly making headlines as governments around the world consider take action against the video platform. International law permits exactly that. READ: Commentary: Are the best days of Big Tech over? near $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly, should be worried about pretty much all of the apps they use, implemented by Russia during the 2016 election, allowing spyware on more than 500 Android apps, TikTok: the most exciting, and controversial, social media app on the planet, This week in TikTok: MAGA meltdowns and Gen Z revolutions, “This dynamic is immortal”: Why OK boomer is much more complicated than the meme. In early October, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) called for a formal investigation into whether TikTok poses a national security risk. “Beware,” it warns, “the social media giant not only collects troves of personal data on you, but also cooperates with the CCP, extending China’s surveillance and censorship reach beyond its borders.”, speculation as to whether the U.S. will find some way to ban the app, , cutting access to tens of millions of American users and calling a halt to TikTok’s soaraway growth. Later that month, two senators from both political parties, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), followed suit, calling for a “rigorous assessment” of the potential national security risks of TikTok by US intelligence officials. In contrast, TikTok starts its recommendation engine with content moderation. “Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China,” it read. A report from 2019 revealed that TikTok did indeed censor videos that the Chinese government did not approve of, including those that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to internal documents. If done for those reasons, a TikTok ban wouldn’t be an illegal act of a president angry at China. A visitor passes the Tiktok booth at the 2019 Smart Expo in Hangzhou, China, on October 18, 2019. In January 2019, TikTok was banned by the US army as scrutiny over the platform’s relationship with China, where the app was made, began to grow. Microsoft was seen as the favourite to purchase the viral video app, in partnership with Walmart, but has since said that Bytedance declined its offer. It appears as if the app will become ‘partnered’ with Oracle, rather than buying the app’s US operations entirely. At the start of 2019 TikTok US brought in a country general manager and a US Head of Trust and Safety who have autonomy over moderation policies. China’s National Intelligence Law from 2017 requires organisations and citizens to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work,” and although Chinese companies have said they would not comply with such action, experts reportedly believe they would not have a choice. There are reasons to believe Beijing could exert influence over TikTok parent ByteDance. Instead, it can sidestep social networks altogether by matching individuals directly with their interests – the more efficiently it does so, the more it is rewarded by the global attention economy. . Over the past year and a half, TikTok, where under-60-second videos often feature bizarre memes, inside jokes, and bite-sized sketch comedy, has become the defining social media app of Gen Z, not only in the US but around the world in places like India and Europe. Yes, TikTok is a potential threat to the west, in as much as it is a Chinese-owned app now installed on hundreds of millions of devices.
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