The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 last week to advance legislation effectively prohibiting apps “controlled” by a foreign adversary from operating in this country, with TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, mentioned by name. The only alternative the bill contemplates is for the executive branch to approve a divestiture. The proposal is drafted more carefully than previous attempts to send ByteDance packing and enjoys wide support. Still, Congress shouldn’t exile a vibrant outlet for speech without a credible adjudication of whether and how it poses a threat to national security.
No one should assume TikTok is nothing more than an innocent diversion for young people (and admittedly some older ones, too), merely allowing them to scroll through makeup tutorials, cute animal clips and viral challenges. The app is immensely popular, with more than 100 million active users in the United States alone — and each of those users, some of them potentially people of power and influence, provides TikTok a trove of personal data that the company can theoretically access and exploit. Depending on the permissions granted to the app, that data might not be restricted to what happens on TikTok: It could also include locations visited, connected WiFi routers and more. The Chinese Communist Party has no qualms about demanding Chinese companies hand over this kind of information; ByteDance would have no choice but to acquiesce.
That’s the privacy threat. Then there’s the information threat. China spreads propaganda far and wide on social media sites — including TikTok, where, a report recently released by the director of national intelligence’s office warns, accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm might have targeted candidates during the 2022 midterm elections. The question is whether Beijing will go further than just that, meddling with TikTok’s algorithm to ensure that political narratives it prefers prevail in viewers’ feeds. Discerning whether that’s occurring is nearly impossible; recommendation systems are generally black boxes. But reports of censorship on the app, particularly during pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, give cause for concern.
There’s no concrete evidence at the moment that either of these two threats has materialized in the United States. There is only the risk they could. Perhaps the lawmakers who voted for the TikTok bill anticipate that the social media service will never have to be banned but that, instead, the threat of a ban will force ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations.
But such a bet would be risky and the process unfair. The proper response is for the government to deliberately evaluate TikTok’s dangers, then act according to its findings. This is exactly what’s supposed to be occurring right now at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — but the process, involving a potential arrangement with ByteDance that might mitigate concerns, has stopped and started and appears to be stalled. Mr. Biden has also directed the Commerce Department to devise regulations addressing foreign software more generally that would, if well-drafted, provide a framework for this sort of evaluation — of TikTok and any other software.
That’s the right approach. The wrong approach is to skip the procedure and declare ByteDance’s TikTok verboten. The bill before the House would also create a mechanism for the president easily to designate other apps as impermissibly subject to foreign control. This is too vulnerable to the whims of legislators eager for a campaign trail talking point, as well as executives seeking geopolitical clout. Just look at politicians’ many overheated declarations about TikTok’s harms.
The government ought to set itself a high bar for dictating to Americans where they can and can’t express themselves. This bill would place it too low.
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