U.S. President Joe Biden became one of his country’s 170 million TikTok users in February and, then, in March, promised to sign legislation into law that might ban or force the video-sharing portal’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from it, if a bill supporting such a measure is passed by the Senate in Washington. The bill has already powered through the House of Representatives.
There is only one reason to explain this sequence of events, and it is not hypocrisy or geriatric judgment: Biden is on TikTok because, to get reelected, he has to be. Otherwise, he would risk missing out on the Gen Z audience that relies on it as their primary source of news. And he is there, after a backtrack, despite his administration having previously issued an order for federal agencies to delete the app from all phones and other systems by late March 2023 out of security concerns.
So, the United States of America, the supposed flag-bearer of global democracy, is in a situation where its sitting president has little choice but to electioneer on a platform he has recognized as dangerous, whose mother company operates with an in-house committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from headquarters in Beijing. His staff have to manage the account from burner devices.
ByteDance has seen allegations from a former executive that members of its CCP committee have previously used “god” functions to override internal data protection barriers to access U.S. users’ data and monitored the locations and activities of pro-democracy Hong Kong activists. Forbes found the company to be tracking individual U.S. citizens and surveilling its journalists via TikTok. Project Texas, a unit established by TikTok to reassure American users that their information was being held securely distant from ByteDance and Chinese authorities, has meanwhile been discovered by The Wall Street Journal to transfer data back to the mother company in the motherland through unofficial channels.
But this is not the worst of it. Simply by following data flows, TikTok can observe the nuts and bolts of U.S. elections. It knows what content people are watching and where they are watching it in micro-level detail. It knows the controversies that put voters at one another’s throats and the misinformation that resonates with them. It also knows the data tools researchers use to monitor its policies and how to obstruct them.
If it has access to this material, China does not even have to rely on manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm to herd voters towards the message it wants them to see. It can create content and push people’s buttons through any social media platform because it already understands what will fly with which audiences.
On the other hand, if it does choose to lean on ByteDance for help with a covert influence campaign, it will find fertile ground: TikTok updates its algorithm so frequently that Project Texas staff find it difficult to keep pace with checks, has previously censored users who discuss topics sensitive to Beijing and seems, according to a Network Contagion Research Institute team at Rutgers University, to promote or demote content depending on “whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.”
What is more, staff from another theoretically independent Chinese company — Huawei — have previously aided interference in other countries’ election races, and, from 2016, the U.S. has become acutely aware of how suspicions of foreign influence campaigns can be damaging to the credibility of the electoral process, regardless of whether they are actually successful in changing the way people vote.
One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to find these details alarming or to imagine a situation in which present or future presidential candidates soften policy towards China in order for their voice to actually be heard by the voters they are intending to reach. Similarly, few dots need joining together to find it incongruous that the U.S. is clamping down on the mass sale of app-gathered data to hostile regimes and ripping out possible sleeper devices from ship-to-shore cranes when TikTok can hoover up all the information it needs, eliminate the firewall between it and ByteDance with simple staff maneuvers and sit pretty in the center of the American information ecosystem until such a time as it is needed by Beijing.
That said, the U.S. Senate is not hurrying to vote on whether to ban TikTok or force ByteDance to divest from it for a reason. Government measures that could close media platforms are never a good look, and people who have built their careers and livelihoods around the app have legitimate reasons to be angry at the prospect of it disappearing from the U.S. internet. Other social media companies are not exactly whiter than white when it comes to censorship, tracking journalists or persecution due to the background of their investment, either.
Senator Dick Durbin, who represents the Democratic Party, raised a further point, but his ought to serve as a wake-up call. “Cutting out a large group of young voters is not the best-known strategy for re-election,” he said, thereby demonstrating that Beijing might have already acquired an unassailable piece on the chessboard of American domestic politics.
This lends urgency to a matter that goes beyond whether Washington votes to decouple TikTok or not: Legislation in democracies urgently needs updating to ensure that future social media apps owned by entities in non-democratic regimes cannot operate in their jurisdictions. The potential for political dependence, electoral manipulation and transnational repression is simply too great, and the next killer app might be expressly designed to target democracy itself as the victim.
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