Friday Digest #15: Should TikTok Be Banned in the U.S.?
Hi everyone, it’s Kat from Top10VPN! I’m taking over from Sam this week as he jets off on holiday. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t jealous.
It’s been years in the making but this week, the U.S. House finally passed a landmark bill that could see TikTok banned unless Bytedance divests the U.S. assets of the app. If the ban were to go ahead, the U.S. would join a club that includes such bastions of internet freedom as Afghanistan, India, Somalia and Iran.
This week, we look at whether the valid concerns surrounding TikTok justify such a move and how American politicians are failing to see the bigger picture.
Please get in touch at katherine@top10vpn.com if you have any comments or suggestions for future editions. You can also now keep up to date with VPN news and our latest research on WhatsApp.
Wrapped up in language around TikTok's Chinese ownership and data collection, the bill passed by the U.S. House with bipartisan support this week is ostensibly about matters of national security.
On the surface, this is a fair concern as TikTok does send data back to China. Australia, Canada and Belgium have all banned the app from government-owned devices for this reason.
But let's be honest, the bill seems to be more about political posturing than it is about genuinely trying to solve an important problem, especially when viewed in context as the latest in a series of moves against Chinese interests in the U.S.
And TikTok is far from the only platform guilty of slurping personal data. Just last month, Meta was accused of “a ‘massive’ and ‘illegal’ operation of collecting data from hundreds of millions of users”.
Add that to the on-going debates surrounding social media’s impact on mental health, content moderation (or lack thereof) and misinformation, and it becomes clear that other social media companies should be facing much tougher action rather than just going through the motions with round after round of committee hearings that don't seem to result in anything much at all.
I found myself agreeing with what Jason Koebler wrote this week on 404 Media:
“A TikTok ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic, monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does.”
Whatever you might think of TikTok - and to be clear, I personally treat it with caution because of its data collection practices - banning it is a completely unacceptable infringement of our internet freedoms.
A much better move for the U.S. government would be to actually regulate social media companies. Hell, why not go all out and introduce something with the teeth of GDPR and enforce better privacy and security across the board. Besides, a TikTok ban would be completely futile - all you need to get around it is a decent VPN.
We see it all the time when governments around the world try to block social media. As you can see in the graph below, we recorded a surge in VPN demand of over 3,650% in Ethiopia last year when authorities cut access to TikTok, along with Facebook and Telegram.
TikTok's fate in the U.S. remains murky. Not only does the bill face a much more difficult passage through the Senate but it's also likely to be challenged in court should Joe Biden eventually sign it into law.
What's clear though is that the bill in its current form falls between two stools. If data protection is the priority, then the U.S. government needs to go after all social media. If it's national security, then all Chinese-owned apps popular in the U.S. must come under the spotlight.
In the meantime, if you’d like to push back against the bill, you can sign EFF’s petition here.
More on this story
New York Times: What happens next with TikTok?
Independent: China warns TikTok ban would ‘come back to bite’ Washington
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