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US-China relations
OpinionComment
Winston Mok
Winston Mok

Opinion | TikTok’s best defence against a ban comes from its US supporters

  • The defence of free expression, danger of losing youth voters and risk of hitting small businesses could be enough to block an outright ban
  • Beijing could also help by amending its laws to explicitly prohibit requests for transfers of overseas data

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Why you can trust SCMP
TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23. Photo: Getty Images/AFP
Winston Mok
After telecoms equipment and semiconductors, America’s oppression of China is now extending to social media as it mulls a ban on TikTok. But it has no case for such a ban, which would only benefit big tech competitors like YouTube and Facebook at the expense of US consumers.
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Various studies back this up. The Internet Governance Project by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US and Singapore’s School of Public Policy found no proof that TikTok exported censorship. University of Toronto’s The Citizen Lab assessed that TikTok collected information similar to that harvested by Facebook and did not send data to China, therefore posing no inherent threat to US national security – a similar position reached by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As Senator Rand Paul pointed out: “Every accusation of data gathering that has been attributed to TikTok could also be attributed to domestic big tech companies.”
Yet politicians at the Congressional hearing on TikTok last month chose to conflate American social media issues with perceived threats from TikTok’s Chinese parentage.
A key concern at the hearing was child protection. After a record US$5.7 million fine in the US in 2019, TikTok was recently fined £12.7 million (US$15.8 million) in the UK for misusing children’s data. But the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, with offices in London and Washington, pointed out that TikTok was far from alone in doing too little to police the sharing of harmful content. Until a belated rectification, for instance, Facebook had millions of QAnon followers.
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Like all social media, TikTok uses addictive algorithms. The motivation is commercial – nothing to do with the national origin of TikTok’s corporate parent. The solution is surely proper regulatory frameworks for data privacy and youth protection, rather than singling out apps for their China affiliation.

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