By: Michael Pardo & Rachael Castro
On the 13th of March, the House of Representatives passed the bill, H.R. 7521, or the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” Popularly known as the “Tik-Tok Ban,” the bill passed with major bipartisan support with a vote of 352 in support and 65 in opposition. The opposition was 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans. The bill’s sponsor, Mike Gallagher, a Republican representative from WI, cites national security concerns for the decision. If passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President, which President Joe Biden has promised to do, social media apps that are controlled by those designated foreign adversaries of the United States would be illegal to distribute or maintain unless there is a divestiture in the company that is approved by the President. Chinese technology company, Bytedance’s social media app, TikTok, was explicitly cited in the bill. According to the Act, these “foreign adversary-controlled applications” would have 180 days after being designated as such, to either be sold off in a way where it can be deemed no longer controlled by a foreign adversary or be subject to the restrictions and be effectively barred from U.S. markets. During this time, users of these apps must be allowed to export all their remaining data from the platform.
US officials have justified such legislation through proposed threats to national security. Concerns of TikTok being a possible threat to national security were first put forward in October of 2019 when Florida Senator Marco Rubio ordered an investigation with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States into TikTok’s possibility of censoring content that went against the Chinese government. At the time, there was a leak from the Guardian that proved that TikTok was censoring critical content pertaining to the Chinese government and stifling posts discussing historical events such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Cambodian Genocide, and the May 1998 riots in Indonesia. However, they also revealed that the platform stifled content for non-local conflicts as well, including separatist movements such as the Independence for Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Chechnya. A spokesperson for TikTok remarked the company as “taking a blunt approach to minimizing conflict on the platform,” stating the company’s need to be more open about its content moderation. The bill intends to prevent TikTok from accessing the data of its users in the US and giving it to the Chinese government, however, there has been no evidence publicly put forward by US officials that the Chinese government has been able to access this data. Cybersecurity experts have warned caution about TikTok posing a risk to national security. While Americans’ data may be put at risk from TikTok, it is not alone in this offense. During a grilling in front of Congress last March, TikTok Ceo, Shou Zi Chew, stated that “American social companies don’t have a good track record with data privacy and user security,” and cited the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica case as an example. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is currently paying a $725 million settlement where it allowed Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked with the Trump campaign, to access the private information of over 87 million of Facebook’s users. Director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, Evan Greer, told CNN how the bill is “shortsighted and dangerous,” advocating for strong data privacy legislation from all “Big Tech” companies. “Our data will be vulnerable to surveillance, whether it’s from China, Russia, or even from our own government,” he told CNN in the absence of comprehensive laws that protect data privacy broadly.
Another concern among US officials is that the platform can be used to propagandize the American public. In a write up in The Free Press in November of 2023, sponsor of H.R. 7521, Republican Representative, Mike Gallagher, accused TikTok of “brainwashing” America’s youth into supporting Hamas. This after the consistent bombing of the Gaza strip by the IDF in response to the October 7th attack led by Hamas, which killed 1,143 civilians. He called TikTok “digital fentanyl” and accused Bytedance’s chief editor, Zhang Fuping, of being “the boss of the company’s Communist Party cell.” TikTok has denied that it intentionally boosted pro-Palestinian content, nor promoted hashtags such as #freePalestine and #standwithpalestine disproportionately over hashtags such as #standwithIsrael. They stated the significance of pro-Palestinian support is that young are simply more sympathetic towards Palestians. They claim “Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” citing Gallup poll data done in 2023 of millenials as far back as 2010, and that “TikTok does not ‘promote’ one side of an issue over another.” The Gallup data does state that among Democrats, 38% support Israel, while 49% support Palestinian, the lowest support of Israel being among younger Americans with 40% support for Israel and 42% support for the Palestinians. However, most Americans remain supportive of Israel, but support has been waning as the conflict has prolonged. TikTok’s users have direct access to what has been happening on the ground in all parts of Israel, including Gaza. There has been footage of Palestinians recording their homes destroyed in bombing, along with IDF soldiers mocking and cheering at the destruction of buildings and population centers. Across all social media, footage of the conflict has been widespread and shared millions of times. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, Palestinian sympathies have risen from 26% to 52% among younger voters in November, a month after the Israel-Hamas War had begun.
The current TikTok ban has not been the first time that the government has tried to regulate TikTok or ban it completely. The earliest attempt at federal legislation targeting TikTok would be the executive order by Donald Trump in 2020. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols prevented this action from being fulfilled by declaring that the Trump administration abused its power of using emergency economic jurisdiction to effectively outlaw the use of TikTok in the U.S. Considering that the platform was examined as a possible Chinese spy tool, the Trump Administration successfully pressured TikTok into allying with the American software company, Oracle which would then have full control over U.S. user data. Until now, Oracle has made it its mission to protect TikTok’s algorithms and content from outside influence through initiatives like Project Texas. Consequently, in February of 2023, Biden banned the social media app from federal devices also arguing that the move was to ensure that the U.S.’s digital infrastructure was protected from the Chinese government. This measure was put forward after the No TikTok on Government Devices Act was halted by the House and thereupon added to an omnibus spending bill which was then passed. Taking on the ongoing blows from countless lawmakers, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew presented his Congressional testimony in March 2023 stating that the app had no connections with China and spotlighting its data security practices compared to its other social media competitors. Nevertheless, after hearing the testimony, members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce still supported a full ban on TikTok.
According to the Pew Research Center, there remains steady opposition to the TikTok ban among teens. Additionally, the percentage of adults who supported a ban previously has begun to diminish, while the opposition continues to grow. Taking into account these statistics, it is evident that public opinion has begun to turn around. Some argue that if the United States is concerned about national security over user data, there are more productive solutions to go about the issue such as legislative action specifically upholding data privacy for all American platforms to abide by, not just TikTok. Furthermore, various journalists have suggested that this pursuit as it pertains to media restriction has echoed again and again ever since the Cold War era, marked by mass hysteria over communist threats. During this time, for example, a law delaying the delivery of “communist political propaganda” in the 1965 case Lamont v. Postmaster General was proclaimed unconstitutional as it prevented open debate and discussion given to American citizens through the First Amendment. Even more famously, publications like Columbia Journalism Review have revived the Pentagon Papers case (New York Times Company v. United States) which has also served as a reflection of the current TikTok ban. Similarly, the topic of “national security” was also utilized to prohibit deliberation on the past U.S. activities in Vietnam through media coverage of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The failure of these cases along with many others involving the discontinuation of bookstores and media outlets have all led many to not only oppose the TikTok ban due to entertainment purposes but also because it opposes the U.S. Constitution.
