It looks like 2023 will finally be the year when we find out if ByteDance can convince an increasingly hostile audience that TikTok isn’t a national security threat - or what happens to TikTok if it can’t. “We are confident that the proposal under consideration by CFIUS will fully satisfy US national security concerns,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Recode. TikTok’s lobbyists have also “swarmed” lawmakers’ offices, and the company is currently hiring several people for communications and policy positions on a state and federal level, according to the New York Times. The company briefed think tanks in late January, and gave journalists (including Recode) a tour of its new Transparency and Accountability center in February. The company has spent millions building up and expanding its Washington, DC, presence, and more than $1 billion on “ Project Texas,” an effort to rebuild the app on US servers in order to wall it off from ByteDance and China as much as possible, while also promising several layers of independent oversight and transparency.Īccordingly, TikTok is getting more aggressive about making Project Texas’s case to politicians, public interest groups, academics, and the media after years of lying low and quietly trying to work out a deal that CFIUS still has yet to officially agree to. It didn’t help matters when, in the last days of 2022, ByteDance had to admit that some of its employees improperly accessed US citizens’ TikTok data as part of an investigation into leaks to journalists.īyteDance is spending a lot of money trying to convince detractors that it doesn’t take marching orders from China and that it wouldn’t give the Chinese government US user data or influence US users. While ByteDance says there is a draft agreement with CFIUS, it still hasn’t been finalized. ByteDance hopes to reach an agreement that would allow TikTok to continue to do business here while minimizing the chances of interference from the Chinese government. To deal with these conflicts, ByteDance has spent over three years negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, an inter-agency group that reviews transactions involving foreign parties for national security threats. But US lawmakers are much more likely to point to the perceived threat to national security, believing that the Chinese government is using the app to spy on Americans and push harmful content onto them through the app’s powerful yet mysterious For You recommendation algorithm. At a time when US-Chinese relations aren’t great, TikTok’s popularity is a threat to America’s technological superiority, especially when it comes to the internet. Seemingly every Big Tech company is facing unprecedented levels of scrutiny these days, but TikTok faces opposition that its peers don’t. But you’ve surely heard that it could happen, and you’re probably wondering if and how it would - or even why it’s necessary. It’s also not certain that the US government actually would take such a huge step. And even if that ban doesn’t happen, there’s increasing pressure on Apple and Google to impose their own bans and boot TikTok from their stores, with one senator now asking them to do so.īanning an app is more the provenance of countries like, well, China, which has banned a number of American apps and websites, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. It would just make it much harder to do so. It wouldn’t make it illegal for you, the consumer, to use TikTok. The ban TikTok is now facing would forbid its China-based parent company, ByteDance, from doing business in the United States, which would block Apple and Google from hosting the TikTok app in their app stores. It could also be more impactful than the legally questionable ban that former President Donald Trump tried and failed to enact in 2020. This wouldn’t just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices. TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. After years of hand-wringing over the enormously popular app’s ties to China and the potential national security threat they present, it looks like someone is going to do something about it. The act of scrolling through your For You feed on TikTok might come with an additional sense of impending doom these days.
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