If TikTok, the popular social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, wanted to demonstrate why it is imperative that the federal government force ByteDance to sell the app to an entity not affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, it could not have done better than the misbegotten influence campaign it tried on the day a House committee was slated to vote on legislation that would do that.
Last Thursday, ahead of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s scheduled meeting on legislation that would either force ByteDance to sell TikTok or ban the app from web hosting services in the United States, TikTok pushed a message out to millions of U.S. users, directing them to call Congress and “stop a TikTok shutdown.”
Thousands of TikTok users, including many children, did that, flooding congressional offices with so many calls that some offices had to shut off their phones entirely. “It’s so, so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing,” one congressional aide told reporters. “They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away.” Some callers even threatened suicide.
And that is why the House of Representatives should follow through and pass the TikTok divesting legislation Wednesday, just as the House Energy and Commerce Committee did by a unanimous bipartisan vote last Thursday.
It’s not just that TikTok is bad because, apparently, thousands of children and seniors are so addicted to it that they can’t imagine life without it. The more pressing problem, the national security problem, is that algorithms controlling what users see are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and all the data on users’ devices, not just data from the app, but all data on the phone, including location and contacts, are sent to the Chinese Communist Party.
On the data collection point, TikTok has tried to mitigate concerns by storing all American data on Oracle servers in Texas. But by Chinese law, all Chinese companies must share all data with the Chinese Communist Party. And leaked recordings from TikTok have established that “everything is seen in China.”
Equally worrisome is research on TikTok content by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute. It shows that those topics sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party are routinely strangled compared to other content. Compared with other domestic-owned apps, TikTok content related to Hong Kong, Kashmir, Tibet, and the Uyghurs appears far less frequently in users’ algorithmically controlled feeds.
It is not an accident that Generation Z is the only generation to say it gets its news from TikTok and is also the only generation’s members to say they aren’t proud to be Americans. We have allowed a foreign adversary, an adversary with known ambitions to displace the United States as the world’s dominant power, to spy on and poison the minds of millions. It would be as if, at the height of the Cold War, we turned the network nightly news and Hollywood production studies over to the Kremlin.
Some big libertarian donors have tried to make this a free speech problem. Forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok has nothing to do with free speech. If people want to share anti-American propaganda, there are hundreds of other platforms available for them to do so.
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Past efforts to address the TikTok threat have been derailed by attempts to expand executive power so future presidents could ban other foreign technology as well. Yes, the embedding of possibly pernicious foreign technology into our information infrastructure is a valid concern, but Congress should not let that larger complicated problem slow the current momentum to deal with TikTok now properly.
The House should pass its TikTok divestiture legislation today, and the Senate should take it up next week.