Hey, I trust our gov and Voldemort to have my personal information. In fact, I'm hoping they'll install some cameras throughout my home. I need to come clean, I yearn for more attention.
Banning TikTok Won’t Solve Your Data-Security Problem
Beijing doesn’t need the app to get information, and Google and Meta collect much more.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
Jan. 7, 2025 5:09 pm ET
During last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris regularly posted on TikTok, encouraging voters to follow her on the platform, as did Joe Biden before he withdrew. Yet the Biden Justice Department is set to argue before the Supreme Court this week that the popular Chinese-owned social-media app, used monthly by around 170 million Americans, represents a grave threat to our national security. Huh?
When Donald Trump tried to ban the app during his first presidency, a federal court blocked his executive order on the grounds that singling out the company was “arbitrary and capricious.” Mr. Trump also cited the nation’s safety, but lately he has become a huge fan of the app. “Why would I want to ban TikTok?” he wrote on Truth Social last week, above a bar graph that showed his TikTok views outpacing not only Ms. Harris’s but also those of Tucker Carlson and Taylor Swift.
For much of the political class, however, TikTok has remained a target. In April, Mr. Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The bipartisan legislation requires TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face a ban in America. TikTok sued, arguing that the law violates free-speech protections under the First Amendment. In a December ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected those claims. “The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote. TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments on Jan. 10.
Most court observers believe the divestment requirement is on solid legal ground and that TikTok is likely to lose. Presumably, the federal government has a compelling national-security interest in preventing a foreign adversary from harvesting the personal data of 170 million Americans. ByteDance has ties to the communist Chinese government, and in China even supposedly private companies can be forced to turn data over to government intelligence agencies. Moreover, the U.S. has a history of limiting foreign ownership of media platforms to prevent spying. The Radio Act of 1927 was passed in part to restrict foreign control of broadcast stations.
Still, the free-speech concerns of TikTok and its libertarian-leaning defenders shouldn’t be brushed aside. Yes, lawmakers are interested in protecting sensitive data for security purposes, and prohibiting the app on government-issued devices is logical and prudent. But Congress also aims to protect Americans from what a House committee report called “misinformation,” “propaganda,” and “divisive narratives,” which is worrisome. Such language is inherently subjective and suggests that Americans are easily manipulated and incapable of thinking for themselves.
When a New York Times reporter asked then-Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), a co-sponsor of legislation against the app, what he feared most about TikTok, his reply was instructive. “There are two threats. One is what you could call the espionage threat. It’s data security—using the app to find Americans, exfiltrate data, track the location of journalists,” he said. “That’s a serious threat, but I actually think the greater concern is the propaganda threat.”
But TikTok is hardly the only social-media platform that offers heaping platefuls of misinformation and political propaganda. It isn’t even the only app owned by a Chinese company that gathers extensive data on American users. WeChat, the messaging app developed by the Chinese tech firm Tencent, is another. Although concerns about fake news and misleading conjecture are legitimate, the best way to fight propaganda is with counterspeech, not censorship.
Another problem with banning TikTok might be that it will do little if anything to address data-security concerns. Foreign and domestic tech companies capture mountains of user information, which enable them to target advertising. TikTok is far from the worst offender. A 2022 Consumer Reports study noted that Google and Meta collect much more data than TikTok. As Scientific American reported last year, “many foreign and domestic tech companies collect data on their users at staggering scale and depth. Many of those data are traded globally in legal markets through third-party data brokers.”
Calli Schroeder of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which studies digital privacy issues, told the magazine that banning TikTok amounts to “security theater.” According to Ms. Schroeder, “you could get rid of TikTok today, and China would not lose any significant [amount] of personal information on Americans.”
The reality is that nothing TikTok does is unique to TikTok, and China doesn’t need the app to access our data. If Congress wants to do something about digital privacy, it will have to do better than this.
Comments