The United States will not wait for TikTok to die of success. The Senate seats could be the electric chair of the Chinese technology company, in case it does not agree to be sold to the native digital landowners. National security reasons will be put forward by those who know, better than anyone, what networks are for.
But the People’s Republic of China has already come out against the selective praise of the free market by the United States of America. A defense that ends, they say, when consumers opt for a product of another nationality, preferably Chinese.
The CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, expressed this Thursday his “disappointment” and willingness to stand up to the vote in the United States House of Representatives, which yesterday paved the way for its ban in the Senate. The executive, a Singaporean national, was subjected a month and a half ago to an interrogation in said chamber that was considered humiliating and racist on the island of his origin.
Millions of American teenagers, separated for their sake from such a harmful influence, may not know that this prohibitionist path was already taken by India in 2020. It was then that Prime Minister Narendra Modi took revenge on China for a Himalayan skirmish – by clubbing. – in which the Indian soldiers bore, by far, the worst part, with around twenty dead.
TikTok, which was the most popular application in India, was banned along with several dozen others, all of the same nationality, not specified, “for security reasons.” Its immense market has subsequently been occupied by Instagram and some national alternatives. To Washington’s even greater embarrassment, New Delhi’s “hot” ban on TikTok has then been followed, albeit for moralistic reasons, by regimes as disliked as the Iran of the ayatollahs and the Afghanistan of the Taliban.
The aforementioned Shou showed his anger in a video published on a TikTok account in
Since the Arab Springs, if not before, the authorities in Beijing realized the mobilizing – or destabilizing, depending on your point of view – potential of US-based social networks. Virtually all of them – from Facebook to Twitter – are inaccessible in China – unless you use a VPN. Alternatively, Chinese entrepreneurs have developed their own applications with great success. WeChat, for example, acts as WhatsApp.
Likewise, TikTok is nothing more than the foreign version of the Chinese application Douyin, both owned by the same parent company based in Beijing, called ByteDance in English.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives approved a bill that provides for the censorship and closure of TikTok in the US “if ByteDance does not get rid of it within 165 days.” Executive Shou Chew argued this Thursday that such a veto would harm “many small businesses,” putting “more than 300,000 American jobs” at risk. Therefore, Shou urged his millions of users to “continue sharing your stories” and “raise your voice to senators.”
Critics of TikTok argue that the platform poses a national security threat due to the possibility of the Chinese government accessing user data. This argument once led the European Union to prohibit its officials from installing it on their official mobile phones. Many other countries, such as Australia, have followed the same path. For French officials, the ban on TikTok goes hand in hand with that of Twitter, Instagram and other applications. All of them, according to Paris, present data leak risks.
TikTok, for its part, has denied these accusations and has stated that it has never shared user data with the Chinese government.
The Communist Party of China (CCP) is not, a priori, the best suited to teach free market lessons. However – despite its countless vetoes of US technology companies – the Chinese government on Thursday described the measures against TikTok as “repressive”. “It is an intimidating tactic by the US, which will turn against them,” they emphasize in Beijing. Not in vain, the American digital oligopolies (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft) occupy a hegemonic position in most countries, which makes them vulnerable to possible antitrust laws.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin also stressed that “the US has never been able to find any evidence that TikTok threatens its national security.” In any case, if the country of Amazon and Microsoft cannot give many lessons on free competition in this area, even less can China give them on freedom of expression. The very separation between Douyin and TikTok, which use the same software, is due to the desire to preserve Chinese censorship for the former. And the platform is used, to a large extent, to spread jokes and cuteness. In fact, a specific channel dedicated to jokes was not funny to the CCP and the company had to eliminate it.
But American power has also shown its susceptibility, greater at the threshold of the presidential elections. Social networks have often been accused of polarizing societies and their algorithms do not seem immune to the rise of populist movements, particularly of the extreme right, from the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro in his day, to the Argentine Javier Milei, more recently. Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa even suggested that Facebook had influenced Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s victory in the Philippines.
In the United States, specifically, it is estimated that social networks have played in favor of Donald Trump who, despite the fixation with China demonstrated during his mandate, now seems much less obsessed with TikTok than his Democratic rivals. It must be for a reason, they think.
