Cade Brumley did not mince words. Louisiana’s education superintendent told all schools in the state last week to “immediately remove” TikTok, the wildly popular video app, “from any publicly funded devices”. He also called for it to be “eliminated as a communication outlet for school systems and schools, including co-curricular clubs, extra-curricular organisations and sports teams”.
Brumley is not alone. The shutters are coming down on TikTok across America with stunning speed. At least 19 state governors, dozens of universities and, as of two days before the new year, the federal government, have banned the Chinese-owned app from being used on their devices and networks.
The moves are indicative of a hard turn against the company in Washington and across the country. In recent days, as Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, the prospect of an outright ban has resurfaced, amid concerns that the app is a tool of Communist China to spread propaganda, influence users or carry out surveillance on US citizens.
“There’s not a whole lot that unites the political parties. The antipathy toward TikTok is one of those things, and it’s only going to continue to get hotter,” said Jesse Lehrich of campaign group Accountable Tech. “It’s a unique threat because it has become one of the key gatekeepers to information in the world.”
Indeed, the five-year-old app has notched more than one billion users; last year, its website was visited more often than Google. Typical US users spend more time there each day — about 80 minutes — than on Facebook and Instagram combined. Over two-thirds of American teens are on it. In Britain, the app passed Twitter in 2021 in terms of users, and last year was set to leapfrog Snapchat to hit 17.5 million people, more than 40 per cent of whom are in their teens and early twenties, according to Insider Intelligence.
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The company has skirted prohibition in America before. In 2020, it avoided a ban by Donald Trump by agreeing to sell its North American operations to Walmart and Oracle. The deal fell apart after the former president left office. Joe Biden initially took a more dovish approach, but his stance appears to have stiffened in recent months as politicians have grown increasingly concerned that no deal will sufficiently address their fears.
The fears fall, broadly, into two buckets: data security and propaganda. Matt Marsden, an executive at cybersecurity giant Tanium, said TikTok is not unique in the vast amount of information it collects, including the location of its users, videos they watch, and their likely age and gender. What makes it different, he said, is that it is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which is subject to Beijing law — including requirements to share data with the government.
Marsden said: “People don’t recognise the value of disparate pieces of data collected and then sewn together in a comprehensive picture. And that is what they are doing. TikTok is both a national security and individual privacy concern.”
Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, told Congress last summer that the firm had never provided user information to China’s government, after reports that ByteDance regularly accessed the data of American users. Chew wrote: “We have not been asked for such data [from the Chinese Communist Party]. We have not provided US user data to the CCP, nor would we if asked.”
But fewer and fewer people in the corridors of power believe that. Senator Marco Rubio and congressman Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, co-sponsored a bill in December to ban TikTok. “This is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company.”
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Brendan Carr, one of five members of the Federal Communications Commission, lauded India’s decision to ban TikTok in 2020 and said that doing the same in America has become “a question of when, not if”.
The firm did itself no favours last month when it revealed that employees had used the app to track the location of journalists who had written critical stories about it. ByteDance fired the staff. It said: “This misbehaviour is unacceptable and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users.”
The other worry centres on the app’s core recommendation algorithm, which has proved uniquely powerful in sucking in users and keeping them scrolling. Lehrich said: “As the app becomes one of the ... most influential platforms in the world — [in] shaping culture and politics and discourse — the big concern is the recommendation algorithm and the ability of the CCP to turn the dials in whatever way they think is beneficial to them. The propaganda capacity is unrivalled and undetectable.”
The firm has long denied that China has any sway or influence over how it is run or the design of its algorithm. “There is zero truth to that suggestion,” it said. “The Chinese Communist Party has neither direct nor indirect control of ByteDance or TikTok.” Politicians, however, are unconvinced, and the company is hoping to strike a deal to allay their fears.
It has been in talks for two years with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a government group. They hammered out an outline deal this summer under which the company would move all new user information to data centres on US soil controlled by Oracle, and wall it off from access by Chinese authorities or workers at ByteDance. But momentum appears to have stalled.
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Washington’s hawkish stance stands in stark contrast to Britain’s more laissez-faire approach. In September, the Information Commissioner’s Office warned TikTok that it could face a £27 million fine for violating the privacy of young users; its investigation continues. Liz Truss spoke out against it last year. Security minister Tom Tugendhat warned before Christmas that TikTok could be used to “influence minds”. But there’s been nothing like the groundswell of concern in parliament as has taken hold in Congress.
Brumley, the Louisiana school chief, said last week: “I have very little reason to believe that we can entrust the privacy of American children to this foreign application.” Clearly, he is not alone.
