Rubio has it wrong on TikTok

Another week, another wave of wailing about social media in Washington (not to mention the rest of the country.) That partly reflects the evermore bizarre antics of Elon Musk, owner of Twitter.

But TikTok is sparking angst too. As my colleague Richard Waters wrote in a magnificent column a couple of days ago (which looks prescient right now), there is rising political momentum for a TikTok ban. This comes after Donald Trump tried (but largely failed) to clamp down on the platform, owned by China’s ByteDance, a few years ago.

Last week Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, released an anti-TikTok bill backed by Wisconsin Republican congressman Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democratic congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi. Cue some tub-thumping anti-Chinese rhetoric that reflects the fact that Beijing-bashing is a bipartisan sport in Congress.

“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio thundered. “This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day. We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”

Ouch.

I doubt whether this particular bill will fly in this form. Rubio’s assault makes political sense for his base. But it has some big policymaking holes, which TikTok will use in its defence, and “may even be unconstitutional,” admits one senior figure in Congress who is involved in the debate.

To explain: Nobody can be in any doubt that the Chinese government is conducting cyber surveillance of American citizens by any means possible. Nor should anyone ignore the deeply damaging effects that social media platforms are having on individuals or society as a whole, and the potential for these to be manipulative. As the mother of teenagers, I know. .

But it seems hard to believe that the Chinese government is deliberately using TikTok to pervert the minds of American teenagers, or spy one them; after all, what the TikTok algorithms essentially do is deploy artificial intelligence to serve people content they like, without human intervention. It encourages teenagers (or anyone else) to go down whatever cyber rabbit hole they choose. This can unquestionably be terrible for TikTok users’ mental health. But not many American kids are jumping into pro-Beijing holes.

The real issue, though, is surveillance. Rubio fears that TikTok is being used as a surveillance weapon. It is hard to prove or disprove this either way. However China has plenty of other ways to spy on Americans and TikTok insists that it is only storing data about American users in US locations, such as Virginia. And while company officials concede that Chinese engineers in mainland China are using some of that data to develop products, they insist that these engineers only have access to tiny, controlled amounts of data, and do not let the Chinese government review it. In any case, other American tech companies that produce products for Americans also have lots of Chinese-based engineers working in China; just look at Apple.

Meanwhile, the ownership issue is also tangled. ByteDance, TikTok’s largest single owner, is based in China. But company officials recently revealed, in Congressional testimony, that 60 per cent of ByteDance is now actually owned by er . . . western private equity and asset management funds. This includes some all-American names such as Fidelity, BlackRock, KKR, General Atlantic and Sequoia.

So will those American groups lobby in TikTok’s favour in DC? It is not clear. But in the meantime, the Semafor newsletter says it “spoke to six of the eight senators on the Democratic side of the Senate Intelligence Committee, none of whom ruled out supporting [Rubio’s] bill”. And on Wednesday the Senate passed a bill from Republican senator Josh Hawley banning the use of TikTok on government devices.

However, as the battle rumbles on, it would make far more sense if Congress started addressing these issues by laying down clear, overarching principles about what it considers unacceptable levels of foreign influence over tech platforms — and then punishing breaches, if proven. Attacking one company by name seems capricious. It would also be wise to start by introducing legislation that requires American data to be kept in databases on US soil. The UK and EU has this legislation. But the US has not introduced it (yet), which is surprising given the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

So what do you think Ed? Should Washington kick TikTok out because of fears about Chinese espionage? How would your own teenage daughter react? Or can a compromise of some form be found?

Recommended reading

• Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley wunderkind, does not often engage in self-flagellation. But Thiel’s postmortem of the midterm elections is required reading since it reflects the exasperation that many big Republican donors feel right now — and suggests the new year will bring bloodletting.

• Just when you thought that the shocking revelations about Donald Trump could not get more shocking . . . an in-depth investigation by The New York Times shows that the Trump team stored vast quantities of top-secret documents (including intelligence reports) in “high-traffic areas in Mar-a-Lago where guests might have been within feet of the materials”. Yikes.

• On further matters of Trump, it is worth noting a wrinkle occurred around his launch of non-fungible tokens. These were widely mocked when announced last week, even by once-supportive platforms such as Fox News. But, as Coinbase notes, crypto analysts tracking this market say the Trump NFTs sold out extremely fast and their price has skyrocketed in secondary trading. Yes, really; don’t laugh.

• Lastly, if you want a different take on the hangover you might now feel — be that from hellish politics, social media or “just” alcohol — read this wonderfully illuminating piece in the New Scientist. It argues that “why everything you know about hangovers, and how to cure them, is wrong — or unproven”. Cheers. On that note, Swamp Notes is taking a brief break to recover from 2022 over the next two weeks. Enjoy the holiday season and we’ll be back in January!

Rana Foroohar is on holiday and will return in January.

Edward Luce responds

Gillian, I think my teenage daughter would find another app and move on. Thus my celebration at the demise of one of her central attention-destroyers would be shortlived. However, I did think it best to check with her first and it turned into my first father-daughter interview (and my last given her impatience at my poor intuition about the subject matter). First of all, a TikTok ban would be “absolutely tragic” and there is no ready substitute. Her peers use BeReal, an app that lets you take photos from the front and back of your handheld phone camera that vanish after 24 hours, Snapchat, which also features vanishing photos but is driven by a desire for “streaks” of consecutive days’ communication with friends, Instagram Reels, which is “utterly cringey” and “only celebrities use it for endorsements”, as well as “looking terrible on your grid”, and YouTube Shorts, which is even worse since they cannot be posted privately. To be honest, I’m not much the wiser but the bottom line is that TikTok is unique and irreplaceable to her generation.

Would the US government go so far as to ban it outright? At this point I think the normal legal and constitutional arguments have little force against the strength of feeling about China, and the intensity of the politics. If you had asked five years ago whether Huawei, the largest smartphone maker in the world, would become a total pariah, people may have been sceptical. Yet it has now been purged from all the five eyes intelligence countries and is shrinking in other western markets.

We also saw that the Chinese owner of Grindr, the gay dating app, was forced to divest it before it went public. My guess is that what happened to Grindr will happen to TikTok. No assurances that ByteDance can provide are likely to pass muster in today’s Washington. But my hunch could be wrong. What I am confident in saying is that US-China technological bifurcation is real and accelerating, and by the time we reach 6G the two worlds may no longer be interoperable.