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A broken ethernet cable is seen in front of a US flag and TikTok logo.
The clock is ticking for … TikTok
President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a law that could see TikTok banned nationwide unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the popular app within a year. The law was motivated by national security concerns.
TikTok promptly vowed to challenge the “unconstitutional” law in court, saying it would “silence” millions of Americans – setting the stage for a battle over whether the law violates First Amendment rights.
Expect delays. Eurasia Group’s US Director Clayton Allen is skeptical that such legal challenges will be successful, but they will still likely delay “any action well into 2025, putting the onus – potentially – on a second Trump administration.”
Though Donald Trump moved to ban TiikTok while he was in office, the former president is now attacking Biden over the law and calling for “young people” to remember the move on Election Day.
Notably, Biden’s campaign says it plans to continue using TikTok to reach younger voters.
What will China do? China expects delays in the process but is likely to prohibit a sale if it comes to it, according to Eurasia Group, our parent company. Beijing is unlikely to respond with a tit-for-tat approach targeting American companies and will instead focus on building a fortress economy that’s insulated from US containment efforts.
US TikTok ban: China’s complaints are a double standard
Beijing blocks US technology companies like Facebook, Google, and X from operating in China. So why is the Chinese government so upset over the proposed TikTok ban in Congress? US Ambassador to China Nick Burns discussed China’s double standard when it comes to foreign tech firms on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. The US has been pushing for TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app’s US operation, and millions of nationalist netizens on Chinese social media are decrying it as another example of the US limiting China’s global rise.
Burns says the idea that American firms could operate in China by following Chinese data and national security laws isn’t a convincing argument because a wide swath of US tech has been blocked for years, and China’s “Great Firewall” was set up to insulate Chinese people from the rest of the world. China’s rationale for US tech companies’ absence in China, he says, is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
Graphic Truth: Which country ❤️s TikTok most?
TikTok has taken the world by storm over the past few years, growing its global audience to a whopping 900 million users and counting. You can find a wide array of video content on the app, ranging from people cooking, dancing, and pontificating to breaking news and political drama. It can be quite addictive.
Meanwhile, politicians in Washington continue to raise the alarm about the potential national security risks of the app, which is owned by the China-based company ByteDance. The US House of Representatives recently voted to ban TikTok if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell it, and we’re waiting to see whether the Senate votes on the measure. But many American users seem unfazed by the political discourse as the US boasts the most users – nearly 150 million – of any country in the world.
Should people be more concerned about the Chinese government spying on them through TikTok?
Who pays the price for a TikTok ban?
It’s a tough time to be an influencer in America.
TikTok’s future in the United States may be up against the clock after the House voted in favor of banning the popular social media app if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell. President Joe Biden said he’d sign the bill if it reaches his desk, but it’s unclear whether the Senate will pass the legislation.
Biden and a good chunk of Congress are worried ByteDance is essentially an arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Do they have a point, or are they just fearmongering in an election year amid newly stabilized but precarious relations between Washington and Beijing?
All eyes on China
In 2017, China passed a national security law that allows Beijing to compel Chinese companies to share their data under certain circumstances. That law and others have US officials worried that China could collect information from TikTok on roughly 150 million US users. Pro-ban advocates also lament that the CCP has a seat on the ByteDance board, meaning the party has direct influence over the company.
Another worry: TikTok could push Chinese propaganda on Americans, shaping domestic politics and electoral outcomes at a time when US democracy is fragile. TikTok denies the accusations, and there’s no public evidence that China has used TikTok to spy on Americans.
Still, there is growing bipartisan support for taking on TikTok and its connections to China, says Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at Eurasia Group. And the public may not be privy to all of the motivations for banning the app. “We don’t know what the US intelligence community knows,” she says.
Incidentally, none of these security worries have stopped members of Congress who voted for the potential ban from using TikTok, while a few who voted against it – including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush – are users themselves.
In theory, the TikTok bill could apply to other apps – anything designated as being too close to foreign adversaries and a threat to the US or its interests. But TikTok and China are the main focus right now, and not just for the US ...
View up north
Canada banned TikTok from government phones in 2023, the same year Ottawa launched a security review of the wildly popular app without letting Canadians, 3.2 million of whom are users, know it was doing so.
Ottawa isn’t rushing to get ahead of Washington on this, so it could be a while before we see the results of the review. There’s no indication of any TikTok bill in the works, but there may be no need for one. The security review could lead to “enhanced scrutiny” of TikTok under the Investment Canada Act by way of a provision concerning digital media.
Canada would also have a hard time breaking from the US if it decides to deep-six TikTok given the extent to which the two countries are intertwined when it comes to national security.
Consequences of tanking TikTok
If there is a ban, critics are already warning of dire consequences. The economic impact could be substantial, especially for those who make a living on the app. That includes 7 million small and medium businesses in the US that contribute tens of billions of dollars to the country’s GDP, according to a report by Oxford Economics and TikTok. In Canada, TikTok has an ad reach of 36% among all adults. If app stores are forced to remove TikTok, it will be a blow to the influencer-advertising industrial complex that drives an increasingly large segment of the two economies.
There are also fears a ban will infringe on free speech rights, including the capacity for journalists to do their job and reach eyeballs. In 2022, 67% of US teens aged 13 to 17 used TikTok. In Canada, 14% of Canadians who used the internet were on TikTok, including 53% of connected 18-24-year-olds – which is the vast majority of them.
Meanwhile, there’s consternation that a ban would undermine US criticisms of foreign states, particularly authoritarian ones, for their censorship regimes. Some say an American ban would embolden authoritarians who would be keen to use the ban as justification for invoking or extending their crackdowns.
Big Tech could grow
A forced TikTok sale could also invite its own set of problems. Only so many entities are capable of purchasing a tech behemoth – Meta, Apple, and Alphabet. But if they hoovered up a competitor, there would be concerns about further entrenching the companies and inviting even more anti-competitive behavior among oligopolists. Also lost in the TikTok handwringing: Domestic tech companies pose their own surveillance and mis- or disinformation challenges to democracy and cohesion.
There are a lot of “ifs” between the bill passed by the House and a TikTok ban. The Senate isn’t in a rush to vote on it – doing so could take months – and if it does pass, it will almost certainly face a long series of court battles. If all of that happens and the law survives, ByteDance could in theory sell TikTok, but Beijing has said it would oppose a forced sale.
Meanwhile, there’s next to no chance Ottawa will try to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or ban it if the US doesn’t move first. Doing so would just invite TikTok to bounce from Canada and its comparatively small market.
What about … elections?
The political consequences of a ban wouldn’t necessarily extend to the 2024 election. If young people are bumped from the money-making app, will they vote with their feet?
Graeme Thompson, a senior global macro-geopolitics analyst at Eurasia Group, is not convinced the move will affect votes. “To the extent that it affects the elections,” he says, “it may be more about communications and how political parties and candidates get their messages out on social media.”
But with young voters already souring on Biden over issues like Gaza, some congressional Democrats warn that moving forward with a ban could seriously hurt the president at the ballot box. Besides, even as the White House raises security concerns about TikTok, the Biden campaign is still using the app to reach voters.
TikTok creators are holding signs in support of the app and against a ban in Washington, D.C., on March 12, 2024, ahead of a scheduled vote tomorrow in the House of Representatives that would ban the social media app until it divests from Chinese ownership.
Clock ticks on TikTok
The US House voted to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok on Wednesday, sending the bill to the Senate, where it faces an uncertain fate. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer has not committed to bringing it to a vote.
Republican and Democratic representatives — who voted 352 to 65 to pass the bill — argue that China could use TikTok’s algorithm to feed propaganda to Americans and collect intelligence about users. Intelligence experts have warned for years that Westerners should be skeptical of assurances that the company does not share intelligence with the Chinese government. TikTok says such concerns are ridiculous.
The bill would force Beijing-based ByteDance to sell the company to a buyer approved by the US government or have it removed from US phones in six months.
Biden has said he would sign the bill, but Donald Trump, who tried and failed to shut down TikTok, recently reversed himself and now opposes banning the app.
Also this week, Canada's Liberals acknowledged that they had ordered a national security review of the popular app last autumn without making it public.
Canada has not said whether it would follow Washington's lead if it is banned, but last year Ottawa banned TikTok from government devices. Tech analyst Carmi Levy told CTV that Canada would likely follow an American ban. “We can’t afford to be out of sync with them on issues of digital policy that are this important.”
In the meantime, the Canadian government says TikTok will be under "enhanced scrutiny," under the Investment Canada Act's new policy on foreign investments in digital media.
The US vs TikTok (and China)
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Four years since the US declared COVID a national emergency, how did it permanently reshape the world?
Well, a couple of things. First, it meant that US-China relations got worse, not better. The World Health Organization, the one global organization meant to deal with pandemics, got delegitimized. This was not a crisis that led to greater cooperation. It led to greater mistrust and greater polarization, in part because it wasn't a big enough crisis. Thankfully, we had vaccines really fast, and it also turned out that COVID really affected mostly the super elderly and those with serious preexisting conditions. All of that allowed the geopolitical rifts that already exist to get worse. One good thing, aside from the fact that technology really works, is that the Europeans got stronger on the back of this crisis. They now have more coordinated capabilities to respond to health crises than they did before the pandemic hit. And that has been the EU response to a lot of crises recently, Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you name it.
As the US House goes after TikTok, does it speak to a broader US-China battle?
Well, it speaks to significant mistrust between the two countries. Espionage by the Chinese against the United States, by the way, that goes both ways of course. The Americans just aren't concerned about US espionage into China. Also, the fact that the Chinese don't allow Western social media companies to have access to the Chinese population and data. So no one should be all that surprised that the Americans are interested in forcing ByteDance to spin off TikTok. Having said that, the Chinese are pretty unhappy about it and have said that they're not going to spin it off. We'll see if their bark is equivalent to their bite. Assuming this passes in short order in House and Senate. Biden has said that he would sign it and then there's the broader question of does it undermine what has been a pretty strong effort by both the Americans and Chinese to communicate more thoroughly in the relationship and stabilize the baseline so that we don't have conflict that scales out of control and that has worked reasonably well since the APEC summit back in San Francisco in November? But that doesn't mean it will hold if the Americans start throwing more punches. On balance, I think forcing China to spin off TikTok is a reasonable thing for the Americans to do, but it will be one more straw on the camel's back. Let's see what happens in terms of Chinese response.
Finally, Princess Kate and the photoshop-fail heard around the world!
Big deal? Well, look, I mean, I am someone, as you know, that tries to keep a much lower profile than Princess Kate. So I don't like to necessarily share all the things that I'm doing around the world. But, I mean, you know, given everyone focusing on Kate's photo, I will share that in the last few days, I was there with Sweden, of course, and the prime minister, who I know well when they formally joined NATO. There was, of course, also the State of the Union, which, you know, I was doing live commentary on and right there from the gallery. But you probably are surprised that I was also right behind the scenes at the Oscars. I don't usually show for that. And it's not because I don't wear a tie, but they gave me dispensation. And also let me bring Moose, which is very important. Don't fall asleep on Princess Kate, right? I mean, you know, she has a hard enough time and she's got to distract away from King Charles. We don't know what's going on with him either. We don't really care. At least I don't.
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The US flag and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration taken June 2, 2023.
TikTok on the clock
In a rare bipartisan vote of 352-65, the US House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that – if it survives the Senate — could force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or be banned on all US devices.
Many see TikTok as a threat to America’s national security since Chinese law requires private-sector companies to answer to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers worry that Beijing could weaponize Americans’ user data (browsing history, location, contacts, etc.) and use the almighty algorithm to influence elections and further divide an already polarized country.
TikTok has found a surprising ally in 2024 hopeful Donald Trump. The former president pulled a 180 on supporting the ban, saying it will benefit American-owned Facebook — which he called a “true enemy of the people” (note, he doesn’t own that one). Trump’s change of heart came days after a meeting with GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, who owns a 15% stake in ByteDance.
What’s next: Although President Joe Biden signaled he would sign the bill, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer’s willingness to bring it to the Senate floor, and how everyone will vote, remains unclear.
What is clear: No one will come out of this fight unscathed. If TikTok gets banned, 170 million TikTok users (especially young people and Trump) will revolt. If everything stays the same, millions of Americans could remain vulnerable to foreign manipulation.Climate strike of Fridays for Future together with the trade union Verdi, sign OK Boomer, Munich, Odeonsplatz, 3 March 2023
Hard Numbers: Boomers go bust, Canada aims for the moon, China chips away at Western tech dominance, TikTok smuggler fees revealed
65: The boomers had a good run. For 65 years, they were the largest population cohort in Canada, but new census data says they’ve been eclipsed for the first time by millenials. Increased immigration has helped swell the ranks of those born from 1981 onward. But don't get too comfortable, millennials – Stats Canada expects Gen Z to knock you off your perch as soon as 2038.
7: An unmanned lunar lander is aiming to become the first commercial craft to touch down on the moon this week, and Canada is part of it – literally. Odysseus, as the lander is called, was made by a Houston-based company, but it includes seven systems and key components developed by the Ontario-based Canadensys Aerospace Corporation. Odysseus will make its attempt as early as Thursday evening Eastern Time.
14: Local companies’ share of the Chinese market for microchip-manufacturing equipment hit 14% last year. That’s up a full 10 points since 2020, in a sign that Beijing has found ways to ramp up domestic production in response to a US-led move to ban exports of advanced chipmaking tech to China. Experts say that Chinese chip foundries still aren’t able to produce chips as thin as those made by South Korean or Taiwanese rivals but that Xi Jinping is aiming to close that ground fast.
2,000: How much will a smuggler charge to spirit you illegally from Canada across the US border? A reporter from the Times Union paper in Albany New York responded to one of thousands of TikTok posts that subtly offer this service and was quoted a fee of $2,000. A pregnant Mexican woman who reportedly paid $2,500 for the same route was recently found dead in an upstate New York river.