PRESIDENT TRUMP has a plan sure to make plenty of teenagers very unhappy: ban the video-sharing app TikTok to punish China for its handling of the novel coronavirus crisis.
TikTok’s connection to China invites legitimate concerns about data mining. Though TikTok is mostly full of goofy lip-synching and perplexing meme-making, it collects far more than what its users post — from IP addresses to locations to browsing histories. This is true of most social media sites, and the surest guard against the practice would be a sensible federal privacy law. But most social media sites in the United States aren’t under the thumb of an authoritarian regime. Certainly, allegations of a real-time information pipeline to the Politburo are far-fetched; no evidence exists to show that TikTok has given information to Chinese authorities so far. But the question isn’t only what has happened; it’s what could happen. President Xi Jinping’s government does have the ability to demand data of domestic firms, leaving them little option but to comply.
These worries would make it reasonable for the federal government to bar employees from downloading TikTok, as the military has already done. Whether it’s reasonable to prevent everyday Americans is a more difficult question. Today’s meme-making 13-year-old could admittedly be tomorrow’s intelligence analyst with a high-level clearance, and it’s possible that a cache of knowledge about young people’s habits could prove useful in future election interference efforts. These questions are precisely those the ongoing national security review of TikTok should answer — as well as whether any threats could be addressed through a change in ownership structure.
TikTok has been gesturing at such a change itself. The company has also tried to distance itself from China by pulling out of Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping security law on the formerly semi-autonomous region. Yet the White House has signaled that none of these steps will appease it. The point, it seems, really is retribution against another country rather than protection of this one. TikTok won’t be the last app from abroad to raise security worries at home. The United States needs a lawful process, based on objective criteria, to evaluate them — or else it only accepts China’s techno-nationalism as its own.
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