Biden’s welcome entry into the TikTok debate
Washington Examiner
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President Joe Biden is finally endorsing congressional legislation to ban TikTok from all American mobile devices. In doing so, he is making the political calculation that it will help him seem moderate as he heads into an election cycle. But let’s set aside his motives and say plainly that this is the right call. Biden should be praised for it.
People not aged 16-24 perhaps don’t know TikTok. It is a short-form video-hosting app available in the Apple and Google app stores. It offers video clips that are about 30 seconds long, and it is highly addictive, which is worrying. But that is not the reason TikTok has already garnered the attention of lawmakers worldwide.
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No, the main concern is that TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Even though the data of American users are stored in the United States, it is accessed by ByteDance staff in China. On one occasion, ByteDance employees used the data to track users’ location data to determine who leaked company information to American journalists.
This is not a company that respects users’ privacy. No Chinese company can refuse demands from the Chinese Communist Party for all its data. Because the regime in Beijing is an aggressive and malign autocracy, downloading TikTok onto your phone gives our enemy the power to track your every movement.
TikTok also harvests all data stored in your mobile devices, including your contacts. This is one reason Canada and the European Union have banned TikTok from government phones. Washington followed suit last year, as have many state governments.
Narrow bipartisan legislation that would effectively ban TikTok from all mobile devices in the U.S. was introduced last year by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Mike Gallagher (R-WI). Their bill would block “all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of” the governments of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
While this selectively tailored legislation would get the job done for TikTok, other lawmakers believe a larger grant of power to the executive branch is warranted to deal comprehensively with the emerging problem of hostile foreign technology. A bipartisan group of a dozen senators has introduced the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology, or RESTRICT, Act, which would give the secretary of commerce authority to identify, investigate, and decide what actions should be taken against products and services deemed a national security threat. This power would extend only to products and services from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) pointed to past problems with Huawei products made in China and Kaspersky software developed in Russia that posed national security threats.
“We need a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America, so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole and scrambling to catch up once they’re already ubiquitous,” Warner said in a statement.
Considering Biden’s many abuses of executive power (including on student loans, immigration, and the environment), conservatives should be wary of granting broad powers to any executive branch official. But as long as the technology affected is clearly limited to China, Russia, and the other nations listed above, such a move might be necessary to protect national security.