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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.
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.
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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A CPU semiconductor chip is displayed among flags of China and the US.
US-China tech “Cold War” is on
The best fallacies stem from kernels of truth. In the case of what is being framed by some as the US-China “Cold War,” that kernel lies in the tech sector, where competition between the world’s two largest economies is fierce. The Biden administration has been increasingly clear that it is intent on slowing down China’s technological rise, and has centered its efforts toward decoupling — a low-grade form of economic warfare.
The rivalry has been bubbling for years, as US national security officials worried that Chinese tech firms were stealing intellectual property from American companies and data from US citizens. It spans from crucial sectors like software and semiconductors, where the US is fighting to maintain its competitive advantage, to industries like electric vehicles, smartphones, and drones, where China has the edge (maybe AI too).
China’s technological rise can be attributed to its skilled and lower-cost workforce and its ability to subsidize domestic companies and push out Western rivals. As a result, Chinese companies lead the world in smartphone sales, especially in Asia and Africa, and Huawei dominates the (non-Western) telecommunications sector.
Alarmed by the mounting competition, the Biden administration’s decoupling strategy has taken the form of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, and visa limits. It has also put pressure on its allies to ban Huawei from the 5G networks. Washington has dramatically expanded its control over tech flowing to Beijing and imposed aggressive sanctions on China’s chip and semiconductor industry.
Yet, the costs of decoupling may outweigh the gains. It won’t cripple China’s tech sector, but merely “slows down China at the cost of hurting US companies at the same time,” says Eurasia Group expert Xiaomeng Lu.
One way the US-China tech race could acquire Cold War vibes is by creating a bipolar world where Chinese technology reigns supreme in Asian and African nations but is blocked from the West. The US weighing a TikTok ban is a step in this direction, and US tech giants like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are already unavailable in China.
What’s more, social media is likely only the first step of the US-China decoupling. In 2020, the State Department launched a plan to block out any connection to China, including telecommunications networks, mobile apps, cloud services, and even the undersea cables that carry web data between nations.
TikTok app in front of an American flag
Montana takes on TikTok
It’s set to take effect on January 1, 2024 – but lawsuits are already underway to challenge it. TikTok and free speech advocates argue that it violates Montanans’ First Amendment rights. Influencers and the 6,000 businesses in Montana that use the platform to earn a living aren’t happy either.
Even if the bill isn't struck down by the courts, enforcing it will be tricky. Google trends from after the signing show a surge in “VPN” searches in Montana. Also, the ban only extends to new downloads, and users that already have the app on their phone will not be punished for using it. Instead, Montana is putting the onus on Google and Apple, who will be fined $10,000 per day each time an Apple or Android user “is offered the ability to access” TikTok on their app stores.
If Montana’s law goes through, it could serve as a blueprint for other states or Federal lawmakers concerned about risks to personal data and national security. Late last year, Congress banned TikTok from use on federal devices. Lawmakers then questioned TikTok’s CEO earlier this year and are working to pass the bipartisan RESTRICT bill. Congress has also threatened to consider a nationwide ban if the app is not purchased by an American company
Hugely popular TikTok unlikely to be banned by US Congress
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics:
Is Washington going to ban TikTok?
If you used the social media app TikTok over the past week, you've probably noticed that a lot of your favorite creators are starting to sound the alarm about a potential nationwide ban on the wildly popular application. Over half of US states and the federal government have already banned TikTok from some or all government-issued devices, and Congress is now mulling further actions, with Republicans and Democrats endorsing legislation that could directly or indirectly lead to a blanket ban on its operating in the United States.
A House committee hearing on Thursday featuring the TikTok CEO did not go well for the Chinese-owned company, with Democrats sounding the alarm about teenagers and mental health, and Republicans connecting it to a national security threat from China and drug trafficking.
Why has a social media app with over 150 million American users created so much controversy? Supporters of a nationwide TikTok ban argue that the app represents a threat to national security because its parent company ByteDance has connections to the Chinese Communist Party, who are accused of potentially using the app to collect massive amounts of data on American users. The US and China don't exactly have the best relationship right now, with lawmakers worried about Chinese data collection and the threat of China sending military aid to Russia.
The one area that has been consistently bipartisan in the United States in recent years has been countering China at every turn to prevent them from chipping away at America's economic and military dominance in the world.
TikTok has maintained that it keeps its user data private, and those who oppose banning the app argue that doing so would not actually help with data privacy, given them multitude of other companies who also collect and sell data on American users.
A big question for TikTok's critics is how China might be using the data it collects, which is primarily used for insights about which kind of cat videos users enjoy, to undermine American security, a question that was mostly left unanswered at the hearing.
Banning the app would be hugely unpopular. Nearly half of Americans use it. If TikTok is banned, it would be a major advantage for its American headquartered companies like Meta, which would likely see a surge of users to its imitator product Reels. Congress might not be willing to undergo this backlash, which means that the action may fall to President Biden, who is pushing for a nationwide ban unless ByteDance sells its shares of TikTok and keeps all its data here in the US. This seemingly harmless social media app could end up being one of the most high profile victims of the growing competition between the world's two largest economies.
Should the US ban TikTok?
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear before Congress on Thursday to deliver one message: We come in peace.
The popular video-sharing app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has been locked in a years-long battle with the US government that has become a flashpoint in the increasingly strained relationship between the United States and China.
Intelligence officials and lawmakers from both parties say TikTok poses a threat to national security, arguing the Chinese government can use it to surveil and manipulate Americans at will — a charge that TikTok and Beijing deny. TikTok has been on the chopping block since former President Donald Trump tried and failed to ban it in 2020. Last December, the government prohibited its use on federal devices following months of congressional hearings, and many states and colleges have followed suit. Yet the app can still be used on personal devices, and its reach continues to grow unabated, with nearly half of all Americans (!) now active users of the app.
That could change soon. Despite TikTok’s claim that it’s harmless and “too big to ban,” calls to restrict the app have reached a fever pitch just as getting tough on China has become politically fashionable. President Joe Biden is now pushing for a nationwide ban unless ByteDance divests from TikTok, and Congress is drafting bipartisan legislation that would make that happen.
But would that be the right move? Let’s look at the strongest case for and against a full ban.
The case for a ban
TikTok answers to the Chinese Communist Party. China is an authoritarian state capitalist regime with no rule of law, individual liberties, or free market economy, locked in an increasingly adversarial strategic competition with the United States. Chinese private-sector companies may be nominally autonomous from the government, but when it comes to national security, they are mere arms of the CCP. China’s 2017 national intelligence law requires all Chinese companies to share any customer information with national security implications — potentially including data on US citizens — with the government. Moreover, Beijing has taken an equity stake and a special board seat at ByteDance, furnishing China with a way to exert direct influence over the company’s day-to-day operations.
In practice, this means Beijing could weaponize the inordinate amount of user data collected by TikTok (including location and browsing data) to spy on American citizens. While TikTok has long maintained that it stores US user data within the US, multiple episodes have revealed that ByteDance employees have had access to non-public US user data and may have even used the app to surveil US reporters. The FBI and other spy agencies have warned that Beijing could easily force ByteDance to hand over its data on American users, including US government employees, for blackmail or espionage purposes.
Beijing could also commandeer TikTok’s algorithm to push disinformation, “shadow ban” anti-China and pro-US content, sow division, and influence American public opinion. We know ByteDance can censor content; there’s evidence that TikTok already suppresses references to things like China’s treatment of Uyghurs and the Tiananmen Square massacre. More perniciously, it could subtly influence user feeds without anyone realizing it, boosting content that may not be explicit propaganda but that nonetheless pushes China’s positions or advances its interests. In the extreme, China could use the app to sway US elections, much like Russia did in 2016 on Facebook and Twitter but to much greater effect.
Despite assurances from TikTok that it is neither sharing US citizen data with Beijing nor surreptitiously manipulating content feeds, the fact is both could be easily done. While the remedies proposed by ByteDance — such as having a US company handle all US data and committing to adhere to strict privacy and security practices in the US — may solve the data protection issue, nothing short of an outright ban can mitigate the malign influence challenge.
No matter what it promises, the company is ultimately beholden to the Chinese government. And it would only take one breach — whether it’s a handover of American users’ personal data or an influence campaign at a time of crisis — to cause significant harm to US national security.
China already bans all US social media platforms under the guise of national security, so why shouldn’t the US respond in kind? TikTok itself is banned in China, with Beijing only allowing ByteDance to operate a heavily censored version of the app for its own citizens. A US ban of TikTok would only be a fair and reciprocal response — one that would protect not only US national security but also American social media giants (which aren’t allowed to do business in China) from their most formidable competitor in the US.
The case against a ban
A ban is un-American. TikTok is the fastest-growing app in history and one of the most popular products in existence. As far as we know, ByteDance has never turned over user information to the Chinese government or allowed it to use its algorithm to systematically manipulate US users. Banning such a successful product without proof of real harm to US national security would cut against America’s free-market ethos, bring the US down to China’s level in the eyes of the world, and undermine any future US criticism of Chinese statism.
It may be illegal. A federal ban of a major communication platform would interfere with Americans’ freedom of expression and association in violation of the First Amendment. As such, it may well be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
It would be harmful and unpopular with young Americans. TikTok is critical infrastructure for the “creator economy,” a growing sector that the United States is well-positioned to dominate. Banning the app would cripple this budding engine of US economic growth and harm the large number of influencers and small businesses that rely on the platform for exposure and revenue. A ban could also provoke a political backlash from TikTok’s estimated 150 million American users, including the two-thirds of teenage and young Americans who use the app and oppose a ban by a margin of 2-1. Politicians on both sides of the aisle may want to avoid upsetting this rapidly growing cohort of current and future voters.
It would have only symbolic effects on US data privacy and national security. Even if TikTok was banned, China would have other means to collect information on US citizens — not least by legally buying it from data brokers. And TikTok is far from the only social media platform with an opaque algorithm and little to no accountability for what kinds of content it delivers to different users and why. The threats posed by TikTok are not unique to TikTok, nor is the Chinese government the only actor with the ability to access vast amounts of US data and wield it for nefarious purposes. Comprehensive privacy laws that limit the collection and misuse of online data by all companies would protect Americans more effectively than selectively banning platforms.
It would make the US-China relationship more dangerous. Banning a consumer app like TikTok (as opposed to strategic infrastructure like Huawei) would confirm Beijing’s worst fears about Washington’s containment ambitions, invite China to retaliate against US companies operating in China, and accelerate US-China decoupling, ultimately eroding the interdependence that deters outright conflict between the world’s two superpowers.
The verdict
In my ideal world, this would be an area for US-China competition rather than confrontation. But competition — at least of the free and fair kind — would require that Beijing allow US social media platforms to operate in China. That’s the American way: Level the playing field, eliminate barriers to entry, and let the best product win.
Alas, the CCP isn’t taking down its so-called Great Firewall anytime soon, so I lean in favor of banning TikTok.
That said, we should be under no illusion that a TikTok ban is anything more than a band-aid. The bigger policy failure Washington needs (but has thus far failed) to address is the lack of comprehensive privacy legislation that allows bad actors — both foreign and domestic (yes, I’m looking at you, Twitter and Facebook) — to exploit Americans’ personal data for monetary, political, or geopolitical gain.
Banning TikTok may be necessary, simple, and expedient, but it’s assuredly not sufficient, costless, or risk-free.
Readers, tell me what you think: Should the US ban TikTok?
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Picture of the Tik Tok symbol over the US Capitol Building.
TikTok "boom"! Could the US ban the app?
As a person over 40, the first thing I did when I heard about a new bipartisan US bill that could lead to a ban of TikTok was: call my niece Valeria in Miami.
She’s a high school sophomore who spends a lot of time on TikTok.
“People are hypnotized by it,” she told me, estimating she spends up to two hours a day on the app, even when she deliberately erases it from her phone during school hours. And during the dog days of summer, she says, some of her friends will tap in for more than eight hours daily.
On this particular day, the two top vids in her feed were: a physics teacher driving a homemade rocket-powered scooter through his classroom to the soundtrack of rapper Ace Hood‘s hit record “I woke up in a Bugatti,” and a mesmerizing vid of a woman applying fine lines of wax to a Pysanka egg.
This is the sort of algorithmic catnip that has won TikTok more than 100 million users in the US alone.
But the new bill moving through Congress could end all of that. The RESTRICT Act would expand the president’s power to ban apps or hardware made by companies based in countries that Washington considers “adversaries.” While the bill doesn’t mention any companies by name, Chinese-owned TikTok is widely understood to be its fattest target.
US lawmakers have already banned TikTok on government devices – but the new bill would permit the president to scrap the app from everyone else’s phones too.
Why do people want to ban TikTok? Supporters of a ban say the app, which records loads of personal data about its users, is a national security risk. After all, what’s to stop the Chinese government from demanding TikTok hand over all that data on ordinary Americans’ locations, obsessions, and contacts? (Answer: nothing – it’s a one-party state.)
What’s more, the platform’s vast reach has raised concerns that Beijing – or its friends – could use TikTok for propaganda or influence operations meant to mess with American politics.
My niece, for her part, says that while the political and privacy issues don’t come up much among her friends, she does worry about this problem of disinformation. “TikTok has a false sense of credibility. If you wanted to get a large number of people to believe something that was not true,” she says, “TikTok could be useful for that.”
TikTok says it recognizes the concerns, but points out that it has already negotiated solutions to these issues with the US. Those reportedly include creating a special US-based oversight board for its content and transferring US users’ data to servers run by American companies.
Opponents of a ban have strong arguments too.
For one thing, a big legal fight could await.
“There are important First Amendment concerns,” says Anupam Chander, a scholar of international tech regulation at Georgetown Law School. “TikTok is an enormous speech platform, one that millions of Americans depend on on a daily basis.”
Supporters of a ban disagree, arguing that a ban on the company isn’t a ban on speech itself. But the issue would almost certainly wind up before the courts before long.
At the same time, banning TikTok could provoke a backlash at home. While polls show a majority of Americans support a ban, Democrats are far less keen than Republicans, and younger voters – TikTok’s primary users – are evenly split over the issue.
There’s a global angle too. Banning TikTok or forcing it to house its data in the US could set a precedent that comes back to hurt global American firms, according to Caitlin Chin, a tech regulation expert at CSIS.
“The U.S. economy depends on cross-border data flows,” she says. “If the United States starts banning companies based on their corporate ownership or their country of origin, this could encourage other countries to do the same.”
But perhaps the biggest issue, says Chin, is that banning TikTok wouldn’t really address the specific concerns that TikTok’s critics have raised.
Thousands of American companies already sell data to brokers who can pass it on to hostile governments, she points out. And as we’ve seen, US-based social media platforms are hardly immune to spreading disinformation themselves. For Chin, the problem is more basic.
“The US has very outdated and fragmented regulations when it comes to both data privacy and content moderation. Banning TikTok is not actually going to solve our data privacy or surveillance or propaganda problems.”
As for Valeria and her friends, banning TikTok might not be the worst thing, she says.